


No Going Back

by Madstuart



Series: Missives from the Black [2]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/M, I'm really bad at science, Let's be honest, how do retroviruses work?, magic obviously, self-indulgent claptrap mostly, so no real science here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-06-25 22:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15649839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madstuart/pseuds/Madstuart
Summary: Dmitri Vologin is recruited by Goddard Futuristics, and has to adjust to his new job and the very strange people he's now surrounded by.





	1. January 18th, 1989, St. Petersburg

“I’ll be at that address until noon tomorrow. If you’re coming, find me before I leave.”

* * *

Dmitri stared down at the little rectangle of cardboard and scoffed. The man who had given it to him—this Mr. Carter—had been very persuasive, but it would take more than a few oblique threats and the offer of a state-of-the-art lab to make a defector out of Dmitri Vologin.

It was tempting. Of course it was tempting. But he did not think he would still be himself, if he left Russia. Not in that way, at the very least. Slinking off in secret, to join a big American corporation… No. That was not his way.

Dmitri went to rip the card up, but he paused, frowning, and set it down on his kitchen table as he went to put on his coat and hat. Well. It was not yet noon. He had taken the night to consider it, but, perhaps… it was true, what Mr. Carter had said. Comrade Kinski was far less lenient than Dmitri’s previous superior had been. He wanted results, and he wanted them _now_ , and he had been bringing that pressure to bear on Dmitri these past few weeks with increasing strength.

It was with that thought in mind that Dmitri picked the card up on his way out of the house, slipping it into a little slit in the lining of his coat before doing up the final button. He was not going to use the address, of course.

But it never hurt to have a backup plan. 

* * *

 “Tell me. Did Comrade Kinski take the bait?”

“I do believe so, sir.”

“Excellent work, gentlemen.”

* * *

 Dmitri got to his lab to find it in an uproar. From the sound of it, one of the lab techs was having a panic attack in a closet, and his research partner, Kostya, was nowhere to be found. Comrade Kinski had taken up station in the middle of Dmitri’s lab, overseeing a group of men who were removing some of the more specialized equipment—equipment that was _necessary_ for Dmitri’s work—from the lab.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Kinski raised an eyebrow at Dmitri. “You were warned of what the result would be if you kept failing to bring me results, Comrade Vologin. This equipment will be put to better use by scientists who are actually producing work that will benefit the party.”

Dmitri was filled with a white-hot anger. “My work will benefit _humanity_ ,” he snarled.

Kinski scoffed. “What do I care about humanity? Just be glad that I am leaving you with what you need to get on with your work for a few months more. Perhaps if you have some results in that time, I will consider bringing some of this equipment back, yes?”

Dmitri balled his hands into fists and clamped his mouth shut. He could not give in to the urge to launch himself at Kinski, to beat the man into a pulp. In all likelihood, Kinski’s goons would pull him off in an instant, and it would be Dmitri who found himself beaten to a pulp instead. 

* * *

“Kinski’s leaving Vologin’s lab, sir.”

“Excellent. Let’s see if we’ve provided the right amount of leverage for our dear scientist, shall we? Is everything ready?”

“Almost, sir.”

“Make sure it’s good to go in five minutes. I don’t pay you to be _almost_ ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

 Dmitri waited in angry silence until Kinski was gone. The man was just waiting for an excuse to do worse to Dmitri than he and his men had already done, but Dmitri wasn’t planning to give him the opportunity.

Once the last of Kinski’s goons was out the door, Dmitri sprang into action, checking the remaining freezer and letting out a relieved sigh. Good. His samples were still there.

But, he had decided over the past half hour of indignities heaped upon him by Kinski, neither the samples nor he would be here for much longer. 

* * *

“Vologin is on his way.”

“Excellent. What was that you said about needing one final touch? Oh, I see. Well, that will have to wait for Doctor Vologin to arrive, I’m afraid. Now someone get me Rosemary on the phone.”

“Here you are, sir.”

“ _Excellent._ ” 

* * *

 It was ten minutes to noon when Dmitri arrived at the address on the card, lugging a case full of carefully packed vials and little else aside from the clothing on his back. Perhaps Mr. Carter would allow him to go back to his apartment and pack before they left the country. He strode up to the door and knocked on it briskly, and it was opened by a man who had the look of a low-life thug of some sort, albeit one in a very nice suit. The man looked Dmitri up and down, but didn’t ask who he was; he simply stepped to one side and ushered Dmitri in to the house and down a hall to a sitting room of sorts, where Mr. Carter appeared to be holding court with a handful more men who were all just as brawny and just as well-dressed as the one who had let Dmitri in. A large, black bag occupied one corner of the room, obviously full of… something. Dmitri wasn’t sure he wanted to know what.

As Dmitri stepped in to the room, Mr. Carter held up one finger, an indication to wait, and spoke into the phone he was holding. “No, something distinctive, I think. We want to draw the eye away from his other recognizable features.” Mr. Carter paused for a moment, listening to the person on the other end of the line. “Fantastic. I know I can leave it all safely in your _capable_ hands, Rosemary.” He hung up and looked up at Dmitri. “Well. Doctor Vologin. I was starting to wonder if you were going to be joining us.

“Well. I am here now,” Dmitri said, holding up the case he was carrying. “And here is my virus.”

“So _very_ glad to hear it.” Mr. Carter stood and crossed the room to stand in front of Dmitri, nodding at one of the goons as he did. Dmitri found himself divested of the hard case containing the samples of the Koschei Bessmertnyy virus, and instead was forced to meet Mr. Carter’s bright blue eyes, which seemed to bore uncomfortably into him. “Do you have a spare pair?”

Dmitri blinked, confused. “Spare… pair?”

“Of glasses,” Mr. Carter said, in the sort of tone Dmitri was used to hearing adults use on not-too-bright toddlers.

“No…?”

“A pity. Ah, well, we’ve got that covered on the other end. You’ll just have to make do until then.” And with that, Mr. Carter snatched the glasses off Dmitri’s face and handed them off to another one of the goons, who crossed the room to the big black bag. Dmitri made an abortive attempt to snatch the glasses back, and was immediately restrained by another of the goons.

“What is this?” he asked angrily.

“We don’t want people asking any uncomfortable questions, Doctor,” said Mr. Carter, calmly. “So we’ve got just a little more work to do before we leave the country.”

Two sleek black cars had appeared outside the house after Dmitri had arrived, and he was bundled into one of them by a pair of the goons. The black bag disappeared into the back of the car, and though he could not see well enough to be certain, Dmitri thought that Mr. Carter must have gotten into the back of the other car; at the very least, he wasn’t in the same car as Dmitri.

Dmitri looked up at the goon who had clambered into the seat next to him. “Do you speak Russian?” The goon did not answer, so Dmitri continued in English. “What is happening? Can you tell me?”

The goon still did not answer. He did not even look Dmitri’s way. Dmitri was starting to wonder if the man was deaf when the car pulled up outside of a building that, even without his glasses, Dmitri immediately recognized as the one that contained his lab. “What-?”

Before he could finish his question, a bag was pulled over his head, strings tightening around his neck. Dmitri was hustled out of the car by the goon, up a set of stairs that he only did not stumble on because he knew them so well, after working in this building for five years. He heard the sobbing of the lab tech who had been panicking earlier in the day, heard the goon say “Get out of here, before we do to you what we are going to do to him,” in fluent, unaccented Russian.

“I demand to know what is happening!” yelled Dmitri in Russian, bracing his feet against the ground. He was pulled off his feet by the goon escorting him, tugged along, and the sound of the lab tech’s sobbing fading into the background. Still, there was no answer. Oh, _blyad,_ was this a set-up? Catch him attempting to defect, use that as an excuse to rid themselves of him entirely?

He was forced to his knees by the goon, and let out an angry, wordless shout at the indignity. And then, very near his head, there was the sound of a gunshot, and the thump of a body. Had that been Kostya? Was he next?

But no, he was urged back to his feet, the hood was whipped off, revealing the body of a man on the floor who was very similar in build to Dmitri himself, wearing a set of clothing very much like the outfit Dmitri was wearing. As to whether there were any facial similarities, Dmitri could not judge. The man had very little face left, merely a bloody hole full of shattered bone and the shattered pieces of what Dmitri assumed must be his own glasses.

Dmitri felt a little bit ill, but before he could react, he was whisked off down the back stairs of the building and into the sleek black car that was waiting there for him, with Mr. Carter inside.

“Could have warned me,” said Dmitri in a careful, measured tone, certain that if he let go of what tenuous control he currently had over his emotions, he might start screaming.

“Ah, but your acting wouldn’t have been _nearly_ as good,” said Mr. Carter, flippantly. He made a casual gesture towards the driver, and the car started moving. Dmitri couldn’t tell what direction they were moving in—his attempts to orient himself as they drove were hindered by the fact that he could barely see beyond the contents of the car, and even Mr. Carter’s features were indistinct and blurry unless Dmitri leaned in far, far closer than he felt comfortable being to this unpredictable man—but even so, he got the impression that they were not heading towards a public airstrip of any sort.

Before they got too far along, there was a concussive boom; Dmitri looked out the back window and, to his shock, saw a tower of flame behind the car. It died down quickly, but Mr. Carter’s lack of concern left Dmitri certain that his lab was in the center of that conflagration.

He hoped the goons had taken the time to empty the building before setting it ablaze.

He suspected, given what seemed to be the relatively ruthless nature of the man in the car with him, that they had not.

A half-hour drive later, and Dmitri’s suspicions about their destination were confirmed; they pulled into what looked like a mostly-disused airstrip. A single, powerful-looking passenger plane was parked there, and a pair of waiting attendants opened Carter and Dmitri’s doors, then unloaded the remaining contents of the car.

“Come on aboard,” said Mr. Carter. Dmitri followed, feeling blank and hollow. Sometime during the drive to the air strip, he felt as if he’d come unmoored from the world, as if the ground were no longer solid beneath his feet. The fact that he could not see the ground very well without his glasses only exacerbated this condition.

Once aboard the plane, Mr. Carter opened the door to a compartment. It was cozy, comfortable; several plush seats, a table, what looked like a bed. “Do try to get some rest, Doctor Vologin. One of my assistants will be in here with some paperwork for you once we’ve taken off.”

Dmitri found that speech was beyond him at this point; the shock of the past few hours was finally making itself felt, and once Carter left him, he barely managed to stumble over to one of the seats and collapsed into it, trembling.

He did not know if he had chosen the correct path.

But there was no going back now.


	2. January 18th, 1989, Goddard Futuristics, the Archives

"Adriane, mein Herz, mein Schatz, mein Liebchen." 

Adriane Dolmetsch, the Black Archivist, looked up to find Rosemary Epps leaning against the doorframe of Adriane's office and smiling a broad smile, and she raised an eyebrow an infinitesimally small amount in response. "What do you want, Rosmarin?" 

Rosemary's smile grew broader. "Who says I want something? Maybe I'm just here for the pleasure of your company." 

Adriane's eyebrow inched a little further skyward at that. "You only call me your treasure when you want something. So. What is it?" 

Rosemary left the door and plopped herself down in one of the deliberately uncomfortable chairs Adriane kept in her public-facing office space for visitors. They were meant to dissuade people from lingering—that is, if Adriane's reputation and personality didn't send them off quickly—but that had never quite managed to dissuade Rosemary from trying to be friendly. 

When she wasn't being a pain in the ass, that was. 

Rosemary grinned. “You're saying I have a tell? How very sloppy of me.” 

“Rosmarin,” said Adriane in her “get to the damn point already” voice. 

"The Vologin project is a go," Rosemary said, her voice elated. "Months of work and research and very, very difficult acquisitions—you wouldn't believe some of the instruments his old lab had, completely out-of-date—" 

"No, I would not believe," murmured Adriane, an unnecessary comment, since Rosemary was perfectly aware that Adriane did not share her passion for vintage lab equipment in the slightest. 

"—but finally, FINALLY, the offer has been made, and they’re on a plane now, and I'll have a full lab again sometime tomorrow.” 

"I imagine it will take some time to recover from jet lag," said Adriane dryly. 

Rosemary waved a dismissive hand through the air. "Well, yes, I suppose we can give him a day or so until he needs to be fully operational." 

"Hm." Adriane's eyebrow lowered finally, and she glared across her desk at Rosemary. "And so you are merely here to waste my time?" 

Rosemary sat bolt upright, excited. "Oh, no! Thank you for reminding me." She grinned at Adriane again, and Adriane felt the corners of her mouth twitch upward in an involuntary response. "Carter finally found out what Vologin's been calling the retrovirus, but I think I'm not getting a reference somewhere. Russian literature's not my strong suit. You know anything about someone named, oh, what was it. Koschei Bessmertnyy?" 

Both of Adriane's eyebrows shot up at that. "Remind me, what is this retrovirus supposed to do again?" 

"I believe he's aiming for something that will induce general regenerative abilities. Increased strength, increased resistance to other maladies, that sort of thing." Rosemary scoffed. "Honestly, sounds to me like he's trying to cure the human condition, but it's not that easy to defeat death." 

Adriane let out a muffled scream of laughter, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Rosemary stared at her in shock, and Adriane gestured desperately at the door. Rosemary stood and shut it, leaning against it and looking at Adriane with an expression rather close to terror as Adriane doubled over her desk, laughing. 

After a few moments, she straightened up and wiped the tears from her eyes with the backs of the cotton gloves she was wearing.  _Must remember to replace them_ , she reminded herself. 

Rosemary cautiously approached the desk and sat down again, still examining Adriane with concern. Adriane smiled, and Rosemary jumped in her seat. "Good lord," muttered Rosemary. "Do I want to know what caused  _that_  reaction?" 

"It is simply that we should have made his new alias some variant of Marya Morevna," said Adriane, still amused. 

"Okay, yes, I do need to know. Explain, Adriane." 

Adriane rested her elbows on her desk and interlaced her fingers, looking over them at Rosemary. "Koschei Bessmertnyy, also known as Koschei the Deathless, is an immortal sorcerer who removed his death from his body and hid it inside a needle, which is inside an egg, which is inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is inside an iron chest, which is buried under an oak tree on a far-off island. For as long as his death remains safe, he cannot be killed." 

Rosemary raised an eyebrow. "I see. I think I read that fairytale when I was a child; it's in one of the Lang books, isn't it?" 

"I would not know." 

Rosemary frowned, thinking. "And Marya Morevna... oh. OH. I remember. Oh, we really should have named him after her, shouldn't we." Rosemary let out an amused chortle of laughter and grinned her infectious grin at Adriane. "Well, he'll no doubt need a new alias at some point. Most of the folks who work with human subjects do. Let's say the two of us sit down right now and come up with something good, hm?" 

"I have a half hour I can spare," Adriane said, unable to resist grinning back. 


	3. January 18th, 1989, Somewhere Over Europe

Once the plane reached cruising altitude, one of the two attendants came in with a folder full of assorted paperwork; an American passport, a driver’s license, a contract, among other things. The attendant took him through the stack of papers, pointing out where he needed to sign and initial. Dmitri did his best to read the entire thing, but the attendant was rushing him through it—on purpose, Dmitri suspected—but even if he hadn’t been, well, without his glasses, trying to read the entire thing would have been an exercise that only resulted in a headache. He simply hoped that he would get a copy for himself once everything was signed, and that the attendant’s summary was accurate.

Though truth be told, as long as Dmitri had access to the lab, to the financial support, to the staff that Mr. Carter had promised, he did not much care about the finer details of the agreement. All he really wanted was to be left alone to get on with his work, and it seemed that Mr. Carter was willing to let him do that.

After the contract was signed, the attendant went briefly over the remaining paperwork, offered Dmitri a drink or something to eat, and, when he refused, suggested he get some sleep and left the compartment for the time being.

Dmitri tested the bed. It was obscenely comfortable, but when he tried to lay down and relax, when he shut his eyes, the only thing he could see was the body of the man who looked like him, the shattered face that might have been his.

So instead, he sat back down at the table and squinted his way through the rest of the paperwork, taking in what information he could retain. His new alias—Karl Ashley Kelley, apparently—the name of the manager who would be overseeing his lab, the names of the techs who would be working under him—Rosemary Epps, Aditi Korai, Andrew Lin—but no, names had never been his strong suit, and he’d found himself uncertain of what they’d been bare minutes after he moved on to the next page. He flipped back to check the names again, but decided he would be able to learn them better once he had faces to go with them.

Goodness knows how long it was going to take until his alias sat on him as well as his birth name.

His head was starting to hurt. He tried the bed once more, and again, the image of the corpse of the man who had looked like him flashed behind his eyes. So instead, he paced.

He did not know how long it was—an hour? Perhaps two?— when the attendant checked on him again. Dmitri took the man’s offer of food and drink this time, and was brought a rather splendid dinner and a coffee.

And then… he paced. He tried, oh, he tried to sleep. Laying on the bed, sitting up on one of the plush seats, even laying flat on the ground, but every time, the panic set in once more.

He wondered if he would ever be able to sleep again without seeing that image in his mind.


	4. January 19th, 1989, On the Campus of Goddard Futuristics

“We’re here, Doctor.”

Dmitri Vologin blinked himself awake, eyes bleary from the nap he’d just taken during the car ride from the landing strip, short as it was, eyesight blurry from lack of glasses. Mr. Carter had already turned away from Dmitri to his window, which he’d rolled down, and had started talking to the indistinct shape of the person outside.

“Rosemary. How good of you to meet us.”

The indistinct shape responded in a cheerful but sarcastic female voice. “It  _is_ my job, sir.”

“Still. You could have left this to your assistant.”

The driver of the car had opened the door next to Dmitri at that point, and was pointedly staring at him, so Dmitri missed what came next as he clambered out of the car and stood unsteadily, clutching the pile of paperwork and identification that he’d been given on the plane to his chest. And then the driver closed the car door, slid back into his own seat, and drove off, and he watched it go, feeling disoriented and exhausted and completely lost.

He looked down at the papers he was holding, frowning. They, and the clothing on his back, were quite literally all he owned in the world at the moment.

The shape who had been talking to Mr. Carter through his window crossed to his side, resolving into a short, wide, dark-skinned woman, with very tall hair and a very teal suit. Details were beyond him without his glasses, but he could tell that she was smiling at him. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Kelley,” she said, holding a hand out to him, with something clasped in it. “My name is Rosemary Epps, and I’ll be managing your lab. You can just call me Rosemary, though, everyone does.”

“Er. And you can call me Dmitri—no. What was the name?” He shuffled the papers in his arm around, pulling out a passport and squinting nearsightedly at it. “Karl, apparently.”

The woman— _Rosemary_ , he reminded himself—laughed at that, and waved the contents of her hand at him. “Here. This will help.”

He reached out and took the object from her, and it turned out to be a hard case, the sort glasses came in, which he proved incapable of opening one handed. Rosemary tsked, and took it back from him, opening it and holding up a pair of thick, black plastic frames, very different from the round wire-rimmed ones he was used to.

“May I?” she asked, and he nodded, too tired to do anything else. She folded the arms of the glasses out, carefully reaching up to settle them on his face, smoothing the arms over his ears, tweaking them to lay straight.

In front of him, her face resolved to that of middle-aged black woman, well made-up, hair just as tall now that it was in focus as his first blurry impression of it. She had to be very short, he thought; a glance down at her feet revealed heels of an inch or two, but even with them the top of her head just barely reached his nose, and he was not a tall man.

He suspected her shoulders, on the other hand, were a good few inches wider than his own, even under the shoulder pads of her expertly tailored teal dress-suit. The overall impression she gave was one of…  _abundance_ , he forced himself to think, setting several rather more rude descriptions aside.

She gave his glasses a final tweak, and smiled, a bright, startling flash of teeth that lit her entire face up, and he almost stopped breathing for a moment at the warmth of it. “There. That’s better. Would you like to see your apartment?”

Dmitri nodded, and the woman put a hand on his shoulder and turned him around gently to face the apartment building behind them. “Lucky you, you’ll be right next to me,” she said, grinning up at him and herding him efficiently through the front door, which she opened with a keycard.

He frowned at the keycard. “Do I have one of those?”

The woman— _blyad,_ he’d already forgotten her name—grinned up at him again. “Oh, yes. It should be with your paperwork.” She led him to a door one from the end of the hall, and pulled a ring of keys out of her pocket, unlocking the door and then dangling the keys off her index finger in Dmitri’s direction. “And these are yours as well,” she said, dropping them into his open hand when he held it out. “Now, I rather suspect you’d like to sleep the clock around just about now; Mr. Carter tells me you didn’t get much rest on the plane. But if you get hungry, there’s food in the fridge and more supplies in the pantry, and if you need anything, I’ll be just down the hall for the rest of the night, and my office number is on the pad right next to the phone, all right?”

Dmitri nodded. “When… what do I do next?”

The woman cocked her head to one side, considering him. “I’ll pop in tomorrow morning and see how well you’ve recovered from the flight first, I think. We’ll decide how quickly to integrate you based on that.”

Dmitri nodded again. It seemed to be the only response he could manage at the moment.

The woman reached out and took the keys back, took the pile of papers from his hands, tucking them against her chest. With her free hand, she grasped him by the elbow, guiding him down the entrance hall to a small living room. She set the papers and keys down on a side table in the living room and opened a door, off the living room, revealing a bedroom. “Doors in the entrance hall are kitchen and bathroom, bathroom on the same side as this. Now sleep, Dr. Kelley. You have a lot of work ahead of you, and you can’t do it if you’re exhausted.”

“Told you to call me Dmitri,” he mumbled, staring blankly at the bed. It had been a very, very long day, the length of two normal days, starting early on with Kinski's raid of his lab.  And then there had been Mr. Carter and his subordinates faking Dmitri Vologin’s death. It seemed that the shock of that particular maneuver of Mr. Carter’s had finally worn off, along with the anxiety that had made it impossible to sleep during the entire plane ride from Russia, and Dmitri was suddenly too exhausted to function.

“No, you told me to call you Karl, but I prefer not to.” The woman sighed, and took his elbow again, pulling him through to the bedroom, turning him, making him sit and then lay down on the bed. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, hardly registering it as she pulled his shoes off, then came and took his glasses, folding them back up and placing them and the hard case they’d come in on the side table. “Sleep,” she said, looking down at him, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’ll all sort itself out in your brain in the morning, I promise.”

He sighed, and shut his eyes, and slept.

* * *

Rosemary paused, staring down at Karl Kelley as he immediately dropped off to sleep, and hoping for his sake—and for the sake of the dark circles under his eyes—that he’d stay that way for quite some time. 

“Ah, well, here’s your new pet, then,“ Carter had said earlier in response to her insistence that Doctor Kelley was her responsibility now, and didn’t she always take care of her responsibilities? "See that he’s fed and watered,” he had continued, glancing over his shoulder as Vologin had clambered, awkward and one-armed given the stack of paperwork he had clutched to his chest like it was a lifeline, out of the car. “And a nap wouldn’t go amiss. My men say he didn’t sleep a wink aboard the plane.” And then, with a last nonchalant wave in her direction, Carter had rolled up the window and then sent the driver on his way, leaving Dmitri Vologin—now sporting the rather awful alias of Karl Kelley, god help the man—standing there, looking like a rather lost and completely exhausted duckling. 

Well, if ducklings looked like middle-aged Russian scientists with squints and dark circles under their eyes and absolutely no hair visible anywhere, that is.

The squint, at least, had corrected itself when she’d settled the glasses on his face, taking an exaggerated amount of time and care with the procedure because the cautious once-over he’d given her as soon as he could see her well had been so amusing to watch from close-up. 

It didn’t hurt that those eyes of his turned out to be a cold, light blue under that squint, and she always did like a nice pair of blue eyes, even if they were attached to an odd-looking package like Vologin. 

Though perhaps not entirely odd-looking, Rosemary reassessed as she stared down at his exhausted, sleeping face. Those cheekbones were rather nice. 

She shook her head, clearing it. She shouldn’t be thinking about one of her scientists in terms of whether he was attractive or not, she should be thinking in terms of what would make him most effective, and right now that was sleep, probably followed by a solid meal and a walk and even more sleep. 

Rosemary shook her head again, this time amused; for all it was just a bit demeaning, Carter’s pet analogy wasn’t far off. 

Before she left Dr. Kelley’s apartment, Rosemary swung by the kitchen, locating bottles of water and Gatorade—the poor man was no doubt dehydrated as well as exhausted—and the stash of assorted granola bars her assistant, Charles, had said he’d made sure were on hand. They wouldn’t be as good as a real meal, Rosemary reflected, sneaking back into the bedroom to leave a couple of them on Kelley’s bedside table, along with the bottles, but they’d tide him over if he woke up starving in the middle of the night.

As a last touch, she flipped on a nightlight she’d plugged in to the wall near his bed. He’d seemed awfully lost, and while it was still light outside, and while she knew from her own bedroom that a good amount of light filtered in from the lights of the parking lot outside at night, he would no doubt be disoriented when he woke and a little extra light never went amiss when searching for a sense of place.

Rosemary had had one of her labs sitting empty for nearly nine months, waiting for them to find someone to replace Dr. Messer, who had left for a two year rotation and who would most likely wind up transferring to one of the satellite locations back here on Earth when she returned. Provided her research on the subjects that were up there for disciplinary purposes panned out, that was. Goddard’s main campus had everything you could ever want for research purposes, but it was poorly suited for the mass production of pharmaceuticals, and Gertraud would want to be close by the manufactory for tests back here on earth. Dr. Kelley filled that gap, bringing Rosemary back to full capacity, giving her a new project to concentrate on, a new scientist to discover the strengths and weaknesses of. 

And a good thing he did bring her back to full capacity; she’d been getting a little bored, with just Pryce and her four other team members to manage, their routines so set for the most part that she could run their labs like clockwork, even with the occasional irrational-seeming last-minute demands Pryce sent her way from time to time. After all, Rosemary had learned to account for the fact that such demands were going to happen on a regular—and occasionally irregular—basis, and even the strangest of them no longer broke her stride. The proudest day of Rosemary’s life had been when she’d managed to figure out what Pryce would need next before Pryce herself had known. It had only happened once, a much lower hit rate than she had with the rest of her team, but then, Pryce had her fingers in a lot of pies, many of which Rosemary only had a passing familiarity with. 

 Rosemary looked down at Dr. Kelley one last time, wondering if she ought to empty his pockets or unbutton his slacks and deciding a little regretfully that, even for her, that was a bridge too far when it came to a man she’d just met. And then she turned and left the room and the apartment, locking it behind her with the spare set of keys she had on loan from the super. 

That was going to be a problem, she admitted to herself later that evening. She could only hope that Dr. Kelley would be an absolute terror to work with once he’d recovered a little and would give her a disgust of him. 

 Because for all the lack of hair made him look a little odd, she’d realized as she’d watched him sleep that she was uncomfortably attracted to the man.


	5. January 20th, 1989

Dmitri woke up to a mostly dark room, still feeling a bit groggy. The sleep had been necessary, yes, but it also meant his body had come down off the adrenaline high it had been riding, and the aftereffects of that were almost as bad as a hangover. He squinted around the room he was in; not his bedroom, of course not his bedroom, but a bedroom, and one that perhaps in time he'd grow to think of as his.

He scooped the glasses up off the bedside table and the room took form, the dark shapes of furniture illuminated by the dim glow coming through the window and the slightly brighter glow of—was that a night light? He sat up further in the bed and peered around the bedside table. Yes, it was.

And on the bedside table... he switched on the lamp sitting there, and stared down at two bottles, one full of water and one full of some appallingly blue liquid, and a small pile of what looked like they might be candy bars. He picked one up and frowned at it. "Chewy chocolate chip granola bar?" he read off the label. "Huh."

His voice was raspy, so he broke into the water bottle, draining it, and then risking the blue drink. It was peculiar, but at least he was no longer thirsty, though now his bladder made him aware that he ought to discover the toilet.

Standing up was a production. He was stiff and sore and his clothing had dug into him in odd places as he slept.

After taking care of his bladder, he washed up perfunctorily in the sink. He wanted to shower, but the thought of getting dressed afterwards in the clothing he'd been wearing for the past—how long? 48 hours? Longer?—did not appeal. But they'd taken care to have glasses for him, so perhaps...

Half an hour later, he'd eaten two of the granola bars (and hadn't yet managed to convince himself that they weren't candy bars) and had a surprisingly large wardrobe spread out over most of the bed. Perhaps just large by his standards; he'd been capable of stuffing every piece of clothing he owned into a single duffle bag for years. They'd clearly noticed his preference for mock turtlenecks over collared shirts, and even more disturbingly, his preference for boxers over briefs.

He wasn't quite sure how to feel about that, but the allure of a clean body and clean clothing was too strong for him to feel too unsettled by it, so he headed towards the bathroom and pulled a towel out of a cabinet he'd scoped out earlier and turned on the shower.

The water was hot, well and truly hot, not the tepid temperature he'd become so used to from his apartment back in Russia. The soap was not the caustic, sharp-scented block he was used to; it was smooth and lathered well, and left him smelling rather like... was that lavender?

After he was clean, after he'd scrubbed every bit of himself that he could, he lingered in the shower a bit longer, enjoying the heat, letting the water pound the lingering stress of the past few days out of his body.

He had dried off and had just opened the bathroom door, leaving the towel on one of the hooks near the shower, when the front door of his apartment swung open, revealing the round little black woman who had shown him to his apartment. She was backing in through his front door, pulling a set of keys out of the lock with one hand and holding a plastic bag in the other, and called out "Doctor Kelley, are you awake?" in a quiet voice as she started to turn.

Dmitri froze like a deer in headlights.

* * *

Rosemary hadn't expected a response; Doctor Kelley's apartment was still mostly dark, and he'd seemed tired enough last night that she expected him to sleep for a lot longer than fifteen hours. 

And she definitely hadn't expected to turn around to find him standing in the open doorway of the bathroom, stark naked and staring wide-eyed at her. 

She didn't really know how to react at first; it was still quite early, and she'd only had one cup of coffee, and her brain really didn't quite get going until she'd downed the second cup, so instead of doing the sensible thing and leaving the apartment, she stared at him.

And then she stared at him more, suddenly just a little bit breathless.

And then, finally, she came to her senses, dropping the plastic bag and its contents with a yelp, and somehow making it back out into the hallway, keeping up a constant babble of "I'm-so-sorry-I'll-be-back-later-so-so-sorry-please-forgive-me."

Her apartment door and the second cup of coffee she obviously was in desperate need of were only a few feet away, but instead of making her way there, she let herself sag against the wall in the hallway for a few long moments, trying very hard to get her breath back.

_Oh_ , she thought, _this is_ really _going to be a problem._

* * *

It took the door slamming behind the short woman for Dmitri's brain and body to start working again. He wished he'd had the presence of mind to dive back into the bathroom, to grab his towel; from what the woman had said when she'd met him, they'd be working closely together, and he suspected giving his new lab manager a full-frontal look at his naked body was not the first impression he wanted to be making. He wasn't entirely certain how he would manage to be professional with her, knowing she'd seen him naked, and she...

Well, the wide-eyed once-over she'd given him had been thorough, to say the least, though her expression had been so shocked he hadn't been able to tell whether her reaction to him was positive or not.

Not that he cared whether it was positive. In fact, he'd much prefer it to be the opposite. Sexual tension always made a workplace awkward.

Which was why he was not going to think about how extremely well-tailored that suit of hers was, or how nice the curve of her lower back had looked in it as she'd backed into his apartment. He'd simply been alone for too long, that was all. _Blyad_ , he didn't even normally notice women, and especially not ones so blatantly feminine. Or not sexually, in any case.

He wondered for a moment if Goddard would see to fulfilling _all_ of his physical needs, if he asked, then shook his head. Ridiculous. He wouldn't have time for such things, anyway. Not if he wanted to make progress on his work.

He'd started to feel the pressure of time, the past few years. He'd started to feel... old. Tired. He knew, logically, that he was still in his prime, that he had another twenty, thirty, forty years in him, but he'd been working towards the discovery of something like the Koschei Bessmertnyy virus for more than half his life. And now that he had it in hand, now that the path was laid out before him, he was impatient, and terrified that he would not have enough time.

So no, there was no time, no space for physical needs in this new life of his. He needed to remember that, needed to remain hard in spite of this newfound luxury he found himself living in. Because failure was not an option.

He'd never forgive himself if he failed.

He realized suddenly that he'd been standing in the entrance hall, still stark naked, staring blankly at the plastic bag the woman had dropped on the floor. _Blyad_ , what was her name? Perhaps it was on his paperwork somewhere. But no, first, clothing, so that he could greet her like a civilized person when she came back. If she came back. He wouldn't blame her if she'd decided she couldn't possibly work with him, after what had just happened. If she decided it would be too awkward.

He got dressed quickly and returned to the entrance hall to pick up the plastic bag and examine its contents. It has a styrofoam container with a post-it note on top, with "Here's breakfast. Plates in the cupboard over the sink to reheat!" written in sprawling cursive. He opened the container cautiously and found pancakes, scrambled eggs, sausage, something he suspected was heavily spiced potatoes, all still warm, so very American a breakfast that it made him smile a bit.

His stomach growled at the smell, and he went into the kitchen, found a fork in one of the drawers, and ate the lot.

He was finishing off a last bit of pancake when there was a hesitant knock at his front door, so he chewed and swallowed hastily as he went to answer it.

He'd expected that it would awkward to be back face-to face with this woman, but she smiled up at him and said "I've returned the spare keys to the building manager now that you're up and about!" in a cheerful, unaffected voice, and he found himself smiling back, any tension he might have felt melting away in the face of her open, friendly expression. "Have you eaten?" she continued, and at his nod, she said "Good. I know it's early, but would you like a tour of the lab complex?"

"Er, yes. That would be nice. I will put on shoes." He left the door ajar and padded down the hall to the bedroom door.

"Don't forget to grab your keys and find your keycard!" the woman called after him from the open doorway, obviously unwilling to set foot in his apartment again after the debacle of earlier this morning. He waved a hand over his shoulder in acknowledgment, and detoured to the living room to scoop the keys off the small table she'd left them on and to shuffle through the paperwork for his keycard. He found it adhered to a list of locations and instructions, and folded the entire thing up and stuck it in his pocket for now, doing a quick once-over of the remaining paperwork in the hope that the name of the woman standing at his door would jump out at him from among the information those papers contained.

"Haven't got all day, Doctor Kelley!" came the woman's voice from the door. Despite the fact that her tone was still cheerful, something about the way she'd said it made him hop back into action immediately, diving through the door of his bedroom and grabbing his shoes, stuffing the laces down the sides instead of bothering to tie them.

He came back out of the bedroom and her eyes went immediately to his shoes, one of her eyebrows quirking up in amusement. "We do, however, have enough time for you to _tie your shoes_ , Doctor Kelley."

"Right. Yes." Dmitri sat on the couch, feeling rather... well, rather like a gauche schoolboy, truth be told. For all the woman's tone was kind, cheerful, amused even, something in her voice went straight to the hindbrain and demanded compliance in a way that reminded him of some of the strictest teachers he'd had as a child.

This woman was going to be a terror to work with.

Dmitri found himself strangely cheered by the prospect.

* * *

Rosemary watched Doctor Kelley for a brief moment, glad she could only see half of him from her post by his door. It stopped her from being able to ogle him quite as blatantly as she wanted to.

Ogling him would only lead to trouble, she knew, but the temptation was there all the same.

Instead, she shifted her gaze to the furthest corner of his apartment ceiling that she could see and took a few deep, calming breaths, centering herself. It was one thing if she wanted to ogle him. It would be another thing entirely if she did ogle him, if he realized exactly how interesting she found him, especially now that she knew what was under his clothing.

Not that it would matter; up until the past few years, he'd been to see female prostitutes on a regular basis, apparently, but aside from that he'd avoided women entirely, and the person who'd done his report had suspected the prostitutes were simply cover for being gay.

Rosemary wished Al had done the report, suddenly. Al would have found a way to be certain on that score. But Russia wasn't a very safe place for Al any more, and they'd had to rely on other, somewhat less thorough researchers.

Doctor Kelley appeared in her field of vision suddenly, blotting out the corner. Rosemary smiled automatically up at him, and he responded with a hesitant smile of his own.

"Ready to go, Doctor Kelley?"

"Yes, er, Miss...?" Doctor Kelley trailed off, looking hopefully at her.

Rosemary laughed. "Yesterday was a very long day, wasn't it? It's Rosemary Epps."

"Miss Epps." They stepped out of his apartment and he jangled the keys in her direction. "Locking up necessary?"

"I'd say so, yes. The campus is pretty safe, but, well, that doesn't stop people from being snoops if they find an unlocked door," Rosemary said firmly. "And please, call me Rosemary. All of my scientists do."

Doctor Kelley glanced over his shoulder at her as he finished locking up. "Well then, you must call me Dmitri." He pulled the keys out of the lock and twirled the ring on his finger briefly before depositing them in his pocket.

Rosemary sighed. "Your name is Karl now, Doctor Kelley. In case you've forgotten, Dmitri Vologin is dead."

He went stiff and distant at her side for a moment as they walked down the interior hallway of the apartment. She tapped on the door to the basement as they passed. "Laundry is downstairs. It's free, but we can also arrange for a laundry service if you need it."

Doctor Kelley nodded, and then said "You should call me Karl, then."

Rosemary grinned up at him as they left the front door of the apartment complex. "Not a chance, Doctor Kelley. But you should get used to calling yourself Karl. I hear it helps the name stick."

"Very well, then I will call you Miss Epps," said Doctor Kelley, looking around with interest as they crossed the apartment parking lot and started down a path towards the lab complex. "Is there anywhere we could get coffee?"

Rosemary let out an exasperated sigh. "Calling me Miss Epps will make you stand out, and you already stand out enough. We had to shift the last Russian who came through here off to a satellite research facility where he's the only scientist. That won't be an option for you. Carter wants to keep your work close at hand."

"Mm. Coffee?"

Rosemary sighed again, and set off down a side path. "This way to the cafeteria."

* * *

After they acquired lukewarm cups of coffee in what seemed to be an otherwise decent cafeteria, the fat little lab manager lead Dmitri off to a large, gleaming lab complex. He'd forgotten her name yet again on the walk to the cafeteria, and was hoping that they'd run into someone who would greet her and prompt his memory. He was still suffering from jet lag, and while the coffee was helping a little bit, the breakfast that the woman had left for him was sitting heavy in his stomach, making him drowsy. Unfortunately, while he heard murmurs from elsewhere in the building, they didn't encounter anyone on the trip to the fourth floor.

"This way!" the lab manager said, shooing him down a hall and opening a door with 'Dr. Kelley' written on it. "Come on in to your new base of operations."

Dmitri blinked and looked around the lab, just a little bit startled. Mr. Carter had told him that the lab they had waiting for him was top of the line, but this... he didn't even know what some of the machines in this room did. 

"This is..." he trailed off, not certain what words he was looking for.

"Fantastic, isn't it? Carter gave me carte blanche, and I'm afraid I went a bit overboard."

"Perhaps a bit overwhelming," Dmitri admitted. 

"Ah. Yes. I've seen photos of your old lab. Well..." the lab manager went across the room to a desk at the back and started opening drawers. "Manuals, here. And your lab techs have training in using most of the equipment in here, so they can give you a hand if you need it." She paused and bit her lip, a brief nervous movement that caught his eye. "So do I, if their knowledge ever falls short."

Dmitri nodded. "Thank you."

She smiled one of her warm, brilliant smiles up at him and shut the drawers again. "Now, while we're at this end of the lab... I do have a solution for feeling overwhelmed. Most of the equipment in here is state of the art, cutting edge sort of stuff, but it's also true that sometimes a familiar tool can be a more efficient method of advancing research than a powerful one." The short woman pulled open a door at the back of the large, well-equipped lab. "So here I've done my best to replicate your old lab, based on the intel our field researchers were able to get to me." She gave him an apologetic look. "I'm afraid they didn't quite get me all the model numbers, so I've had to do my best based on the photographs."

Dmitri—no, Karl, he was Karl now, and like the woman who was showing him around had said, the more often he thought of himself by that name the sooner it would stick—looked around the small side lab, the sense of displacement, of coming unstuck from the world that he'd felt since being whisked off by Mr. Carter only increasing. As far as he could tell, it was an exact replica of his lab back in Russia, from the poky size of the room to the assortment of mostly old and mediocre equipment contained within. "You people certainly do not leave anything to chance," he muttered.

The lab manager's expression switched from apologetic to pleased in an instant, another of those blinding smiles overtaking her face. "I'm so glad you like it."

"Like... is perhaps not be the word I would use."

She laughed. "Well, no, it's terrible, isn't it? Such a letdown after the main lab. I can't think how you ever got anything done in here. But I promise you, the nostalgia factor has been very helpful for more than a few of our researchers, so I wanted to make sure you had the option as well." She chivvied him back out into the main lab and shut the door on the dreary sight of his past.

At her brutal but honest assessment, Dmitri—no, Karl, he reminded himself again—felt a sudden, irrational surge of fondness for his old lab. The woman next to him laughed again, and he looked down at her quizzically.

"I just saw you mentally resolve to do all your best work in there, just to spite me," she offered up as an explanation. "Good. Spite's an excellent motivator."

Karl frowned. "You are very strange woman."

"Yes, well, I report directly to Mr. Carter. We all of us get a little odd after a year or two of that, and I've been at it for nearly fourteen."

"Mr. Carter did not look old enough to have been in his position for so long."

"Ah, well, I meant the Head of Communications in general," the woman said airily, waving a dismissive hand in his direction. "The person in charge changes every seven or eight years. It's always some hardass who uses over-the-top threats to get results, and they all sort of blur together after a while."

"I... I see. Does that mean there are more Mr. Carters out there?" Karl felt his face stretch into an expression of exaggerated terror at the thought.

The woman flashed an amused smile at him. "None that you'll encounter, thank goodness. There is, however, Doctor Pryce..."

She showed Karl another door with a tiny office hiding behind it, more or less a closet large enough to hold a desk and a computer, keeping up a cheerful thread of narration the entire time. Karl did his best to follow her conversation and keep up his end of it, but exhaustion was making it hard to concentrate. He didn't think she'd noticed, but once she'd shooed him back out into the hallway, she looked up at him with a concerned expression.

"Back to bed with you, I think," she said. "We can finish the tour tomorrow. And I want you awake for your interrogation."

Karl gave her a startled look. "Interrogation?"

The woman laughed and tucked her arm through his, guiding him down the hallway and back towards the stairs. "A terrible joke on my part. I've read a précis of your research, but I want to make sure I've got all the details down. Can't do my job if I don't know what you're up to, can I?"

"I suppose not," he said, still startled. Did this woman know about all the details of his research? Or was Mr. Carter the only person who knew that Karl needed human trials? He did not know, and remained preoccupied by these thoughts as the fat little lab manager escorted him back down the stairs and out of the lab complex.

To Karl's relief, the woman was mostly silent on the walk back to the apartment building. She kept her remarks to landmarks on Goddard's campus, adding, as she left him at his door, that she would bring him dinner from the cafeteria, and that there were tv dinners in the freezer if he needed them.

Karl was suddenly too exhausted to even wonder what a tv dinner consisted of. He went straight to the bedroom, just taking time to undress before crawling into the bed and falling almost immediately asleep.

His last thought was of the lab manager, wondering if the knowledge that he would need human trials one of these days would make her think less of him.


	6. January 21st, 1989

Dmitri—Karl, he reminded himself—woke the next morning, feeling considerably less groggy. The lab manager—Rosemary Epps, he’d finally found her name on the paperwork he’d been given and had repeated it to himself until it stuck—had appeared at his door the night before with another styrofoam container full of food, this time a pasta in some sort of creamy sauce, a side of mixed vegetables, shrimp in a garlic sauce. She had held her hands up defensively when he had tried to thank her, saying “Oh, no trouble at all. You’ll be in charge of finding your own meals once you know your way around, of course, but I imagine everything is overwhelming right now, and I don’t have to go that far out of my way to swing by the cafeteria on the way back to my apartment.”

He had listened for her keys in the door next to his after he’d taken the meal and shut his own door, but instead there was the low thump of her footfalls heading back towards the door of the apartment complex, and he had filed it away as another data point about her personality. Someone who would lie for the comfort of others.

Rosemary appeared at his door around eight AM that morning, not long after he’d managed to haul himself out of bed and get himself clean and dressed. This time, she didn’t have breakfast with her; instead, she hustled him out of the apartment building and onto the sidewalk out front. “Time to see if you picked anything up on yesterday’s tour. Tell me, which way do you suppose the cafeteria is?”

Karl frowned. “This way, I think?” He pointed vaguely at a path that looked familiar.

Rosemary sighed, and reached out to nudge his arm to point at the next path over. “When you’re more yourself again, you’ll have to do some exploring,” she said. “It’s a big campus, and you’ll be better for knowing what all the buildings are. I can set up tours of some of the other buildings that you have the right clearance level for.”

“Is there not a campus map?”

“I’m afraid not. Mr. Carter would rather nothing of that sort gets out into the wider world, and that’s inevitable if we’ve got a physical object we’re handing around. Security concerns and all. But you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.”

They started down the path together, Rosemary pausing at each branch to check his memory of the direction. It was not a test he did well at, but she remained remarkably patient throughout, notwithstanding that sigh she’d let out while they were still in front of the apartment building. Once they reached the cafeteria, they got coffee and danishes, a makeshift breakfast they could carry with them. Rosemary winced as she sipped her coffee.

“They really need to stop using NesCafé,” she muttered, glaring down at her cup as they stepped back out in front of the cafeteria building. “Is a proper brewed cup of coffee too much to ask?” She gestured back at the building behind them. “There are a couple of different athletic facilities in that same building, by the way. The pool is outdoors, though; it’s usually warm enough in Florida to swim outside all year round.”

“I see,” said Karl, sipping his own coffee. It really was quite remarkably bad.

“Not that I ever really have time to use either, of course,” Rosemary added, “but I understand it’s all very nice, if exercising is your thing.”

“Mmh,” was the only comment Karl could come up with, so he took another sip of the terrible coffee.

Rosemary shot him a sidelong glance. “So. What would you like to do first? Tour of the campus, or shall I drag you back to my lair and interrogate you instead?”

Something about the way she’d said the word “lair” had Karl imagining a very different type of interrogation than the grilling about the Koschei Bessmertny virus that she had promised him yesterday. It was simply the way she looked, he thought. He suspected she’d spent her entire life fighting off men who took one look at her body and immediately started to take everything she said as a come-on.

Karl decided right then and there that he would not be one of those men. Not that a woman who looked like her would ever consider him, but it was the principle of the thing, especially as she would be managing his lab.

Whatever way she’d meant it, he thought that perhaps her closing the two of them up in an office somewhere was not the best course of action right at that moment. “The tour,” he said decisively. “I need a little more time for coffee to become effective.”

“Ugh, tell me about it,” Rosemary said, her complaining tone comedically exaggerated. “Well, let’s get on with it, then!”

Despite the fact that she was both remarkably short and wearing heels, Karl was hard-pressed to keep up with her as she took him on a whirlwind tour of Goddard Futuristic’s campus. “Campus store,” she said, pointing at a small concrete block of a building. “Nothing exciting, but it’ll get you the basics. Right now you’re not allowed off-campus without an escort—not that you’re considered a flight risk or anything, but you’ll have enough to adjust to, what with living in a new country and starting a new job, and we’d rather someone keep an eye on you. One of the other scientists will do, or I can have my assistant go with you; Charles lives off campus anyway, and he knows the local area better than those of us who spend all our time locked up in the lab complex.”

As she told him this, she was rushing her way down an avenue of trees, all of which looked remarkably lively considering it was mid-January. Florida really did seem like it was on an entirely different planet than St. Petersburg, than all of Russia. The avenue widened out, revealing a large gleaming building, looking rather like a cross between a skyscraper and an airplane hangar. “Most of the training for our space missions goes on in there,” Rosemary said. “Come on around; there’s a geodesic dome on the other side that I always love looking at.” She dragged him around the building to see it, and then they moved onwards.

Karl lost track of the buildings Rosemary dragged him past, each with their own design, engineering, aerospace, administration and financials, event and office space, an on-site hospital. The last was relatively close to the lab complex she’d brought him to yesterday, and she took him on a brief tour of the building, ending with a locked wing that her keycard let them into. “Human testing,” she said, after the door shut behind them.

“Ah. I was… I was wondering,” Karl said, suddenly awkward.

“I’d take you on a tour of this wing, but, well, it feels rather like we’re gawking at them, the poor unfortunate souls, and they should be allowed to keep some dignity. I just thought you’d want to know it was here,” Rosemary said, before ushering him out the door they’d just come in.

“Who has access?”

“The scientists who currently have need of that wing and a small crew of very trustworthy caretakers.” Rosemary’s voice was low, and a little sad. It was clear that she accepted the need for such testing, but he also thought that she did not exactly approve of it. And then she turned her head to flash a brilliant smile at him, and he thought that perhaps he’d just imagined the sadness. “Shall we move back to the lab complex?”

Karl nodded.

If his new lab dwarfed his old one, Karl thought that the lab complex itself could have held the building that his old lab had been in ten times over and still had space to spare. It sprawled and doubled back on itself, five stories of gleaming steel and bulletproof glass. “Not that we get many stray bullets around here,” Rosemary had added after telling him about that particular property of the windows, “but you can’t imagine the sort of stuff that gets flung through the air during hurricane season.”

Karl wondered what number of stray bullets counted as many; Rosemary’s tone had suggested that it was non-zero, which was more than a little alarming.

“In general, the higher or lower you go, the more security you’ll encounter. Anyone who can get into the complex can get to the first floor, so it’s mostly nonessentials, storage of less volatile materials, some admin space, meeting rooms, a full kitchen and a lounge, that sort of thing,” Rosemary had continued, opening a door so he could peer down a first floor hallway. “Chances are, you won’t spend much time here, but this is where most of your requisitions will come from.”

“Higher is labs, yes? But… lower?”

“Ah. We’ve got all kinds of lovely radiation-generating equipment down there, and even more lovely lead-lined rooms to keep it all in,” Rosemary said with a somewhat gleeful smile. “And of course, the sub-basement is where Dr. Pryce has her lab.”

Karl had heard of Dr. Pryce, but only by reputation, and even then only in the form of rumors, which abounded about the reclusive scientist. He wasn’t much of one to give rumors much account, but some of the ones about Pryce had been so outlandish that he was just a little bit curious.

“So, going up… my office is on the second floor, along with some of the more secure storage, the offices that belong to the other lab managers and their assistants, and open lab spaces that are used for collaboration or when the lab techs need to set something up that there isn’t space for in someone’s main lab.” Rosemary had chivvied him through a door that required her keycard to open and onto a set of stairs, continuing her explanation as they climbed to the second floor. “My group is mostly on the fifth floor; third and fourth are lower-clearance projects. Most everyone who’ll need human subjects winds up under me eventually, though, so occasionally I drop in on the other floors.” Back out another door, and straight down a short hall to the door directly at the end of it. Rosemary pulled a set of keys out of her jacket pocket and unlocked the door, ushering him in to a large office that still managed to feel crowded, what with the corner desk, one arm of which sat between the door and the rest of the office, the computer, the guest chairs, several bookshelves and even more filing cabinets. Everything was neat and tidy, aside from the in and out trays on her desk, both of which were piled with unruly stacks of paper.

Rosemary sat him in one of the chairs and then bustled around to sit behind the desk, plopping down in her own chair and leaning down to pull a file out of one of the desk drawers. “So. The Koschei Bessmertny virus.” Rosemary smiled, a mischievous grin. “Tell me all about how you plan to shackle death, Marya Morevna.”

Karl couldn’t help but laugh.

And then, he told her all the details of his work as she listened carefully, making the occasional note on various pages of his file in a loose, sprawling script—with her left hand, he was surprised to note. He had thought most left-handed people had it trained out of them in childhood. From time to time she prompted him with questions that reminded him he had forgotten a detail in what he had just said, but for the most part she sat there quietly, taking it all in.

And then, after he’d spilled out all the details of his research so far, she’d looked at him with raised eyebrows and a frown turning the corners of her mouth down. “Is that really everything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…” Rosemary set her pen down, then glanced at the top sheet of the file and launched into a series of questions. At first he found them simple to answer, this thing or that, small issues he’d forgotten to bring up during his explanation of the virus, but after the first half-dozen or so he started stumbling after answers, or needed to take a minute or two to come up with one, or had no answer at all for her and the sudden realization that there were a whole host of other questions that he should have been asking himself all along.

* * *

Their terrible coffee and the danishes were a long-ago memory by the time Rosemary ran out of questions, and from the look of Dr. Kelley, he’d long ago run out of the energy necessary to answer more questions, in any case.

“Thought you said interrogation was only a joke,” Dr. Kelley said, slumping back in his chair and shutting his eyes. He rubbed his forehead with one hand, and Rosemary wondered if he had a headache. “KGB could learn a thing or two from you,” he muttered.

Rosemary laughed and fanned her suddenly warm face with sheaf of heavily-annotated papers from her desk. “Why, Dr. Kelley, what a compliment to give a girl. I’ll get a swollen head at this rate.”

He peered out from around his arm at her. “Swollen… head?”

“I’ll hold myself in higher esteem than I deserve,” she said, smiling at him.

Dr. Kelley lowered his hand and smiled back at her suddenly, or what she’d decided passed as a smile for him, a brief little upturn at the corners of his mouth and a little flash of light in eyes that opened wider for a moment, as if sharing a joke. “Ah, well, if you will not hold yourself in high esteem, allow me to do so for you. You ask remarkable questions.” He paused, as if considering. “Intelligent questions. Questions that get at core of process. I have learned things about my own research that I did not know until you started your interrogation.” He frowned then, and looked around. “You would not happen to have pad of paper and pen? I would like to write down some ideas before they disappear.”

Rosemary nodded and pulled a spare legal pad out of her desk drawer, grabbed a ballpoint from the pen holder on the desk, handing them both across the desk to Dr. Kelley. He snatched them out of her hands and started scribbling. While he worked, she checked the time, then got up from behind her desk and went down the hall to the kitchenette, grabbing protein bars and bottles of water out of one of the cabinets. Technically she shouldn’t have left Dr. Kelley unsupervised in her office, but he seemed the sort to focus in on a task and ignore everything else around himself, and it was well past lunch time. Fortification was necessary.

She checked the mini-fridge; the cafeteria always sent over sandwiches for those staff members who could never seem to make it out of the building for proper meals. But it seemed that the fridge had already been raided, so she sighed and shut it and decided she might as well make Dr. Kelley practice finding his way from the lab building to the cafeteria and get lunch for herself along the way. As she thought this, her stomach growled in protest. “Yes, I know, but it had to be done,” she said, ripping in to one of the protein bars and heading back down the hallway to her office.

Dr. Kelley didn’t look up as she entered her office, so she opened the other protein bar and set it next to his left hand, along with the water bottle she’d brought for him. To her amusement, as she sat back down at her desk and opened her own water bottle, taking a deep slug of it, he seemed to unconsciously notice the protein bar’s presence. He picked it up in his left hand and consumed it without once directly looking at it, his right hand still making notes, adding one page, two, three, four to the pages of notes he’d already scribbled down. Halfway through the fifth page he attempted to take a bite out of the protein bar’s wrapper, which Rosemary extracted from his hand and replaced with the open water bottle.

He seemed to notice where he was all of a sudden, blinking in befuddlement at the water bottle in his hand before taking a deep drink from it. “ _Blyad, ya goloden_!” he said, apparently not entirely conscious of the fact that he was speaking Russian.

“Yes, I was thinking we ought to head back towards the cafeteria,” Rosemary said, amused.

“What time is it?” he asked, back in English.

Rosemary pulled up her sleeve to check the time. “Nearly three.”

Dr. Kelley blinked. “What day is it? I seem to have lost track.”

“January 21st,” she answered, and when he continued to look at her in a confused fashion, she added, “A Saturday.”

“I see. I apologize, if I have made you work on a day you would not normally. And for keeping you from your mid-day meal.” His expression appeared to be sincerely contrite, and, Rosemary was appalled to notice, really quite adorable.

“No such thing. It’s been quite nice to be able to rely on Charles to keep everyone off my back for anything short of an emergency. My Saturdays aren’t nearly this restful normally.”

“That was restful?” Dr. Kelley stared at her with a little frown between his nonexistent eyebrows.

“Well, I didn’t say it was meant to be restful for you,” she shot back, and there it was again, that almost-smile that lit his eyes up and made her want to smile back, not her manufactured corporate smile but a proper grin. “Shall we go investigate some lunch? We’ll come back here after for your notepad.”

“By all means,” Dr. Kelley said, standing up from the desk and stretching his arms over his head until his back popped.

“I’ll warn you now, you’re the one trailblazing,” she said as she ushered him out of her office and locked the door behind him. He groaned, and she gave in to the urge to grin up at him properly. “I’ll start you with something easy,” she said. “How do we get back to the first floor?”

Dr. Kelley sighed and made for the door at the end of the short hall that lead to the stairs, and together they made their way out of the lab building and back to the cafeteria.

* * *

The cafeteria was mostly empty when Karl and Rosemary finally arrived. He thought, though, that this time he might be able to make the return trip to the lab complex; it was just tall enough to be seen over the tops of the trees that dotted the campus grounds between it and the cafeteria, and in theory choosing the path that lead most directly that way from the options available would get him there.

Of course, he had thought he had known the way from the lab complex to the cafeteria, so when Rosemary had told him she planned to only give him a hint if he got them irrevocably lost, he’d chosen a series of pathways in what he thought was the right direction… and had landed them at a picturesque little water feature, a series of small pools that waterfalled their way down a hillside and ended in a winding stream that appeared to turn into a swamp just a little further along. He had stared at the pools in consternation and Rosemary had laughed at him—not unkindly—and had led him back three turns to where he’d made the mistake.

“Why is the campus like this?” he had asked as they’d resumed their journey to the cafeteria.

“Deterrent to corporate espionage,” Rosemary responded. “Well, in a way. It’s hard to sneak in to the buildings around here if you can’t find them. And it’s pretty. Lots of nice little outdoor scenes to stare at while you sit and think.”

“I suppose so.” He paused, then looked at her. “Is that what you do, when you are not working?”

“Oh, goodness no,” Rosemary had said to that, her tone amused and a little sardonic. “What on earth do I have to sit and think about? Such a waste of time when I could be _doing_ things. Like the filing.”

“I thought you said you had an assistant?”

“And he’s three clearance levels below me, poor dear, though he has picked up on a thing or two he’s not supposed to know about over the years.” Rosemary smiled up at him, then jerked her head to one side in a little gesture that had him turning away from her to look ahead of them. “Take a look, Dr. Kelley. You seem to have done it this time.”

The concrete block of the cafeteria building had been there in front of them, and the conversation they’d been having petered off, both of them too intent on soothing starving stomachs to bother with small talk over their meal.

“So, back to the lab complex?” Karl asked finally, setting down the remains of the sandwich he had chosen. There had been too much mayonnaise.

Rosemary checked her watch, and then shook her head. “I think I ought to take you by the archives and introduce you to Adriane first,” she said. “The head archivist,” she added as he gave her a confused look. “You won’t be dealing with her often, but she’s the only one who can give you access to some of the high-clearance materials, and life will be easier if you start off on her good side. Not that anyone ever stays there long, but…”

“This Adriane is an ogre, then?” Karl offered up as a dry attempt at a joke. It made Rosemary laugh, at least, and that had certainly been his intention.

“Not the worst thing I’ve heard a scientist call her by far,” Rosemary said, standing and gathering up her tray. Karl followed her example as she disposed of her trash and rid herself of the tray and dishes. “Calling her an ogre to her face would probably be safer than swearing at her, which is what most of the scientists eventually resort to when they think she’s withholding something they need or redacting something she shouldn’t. But cussing’s an automatic month-long ban from the archives, which means no access to high-clearance materials at all.”

“I will keep that in mind.” Karl followed Rosemary out of the cafeteria and down another set of winding paths; the archives seemed as if they were set up to be even more inaccessible than any of the other buildings on the campus that Karl had been to. By the time they arrived, he was hopelessly lost, and he sincerely hoped that Rosemary would not expect him to find his way back to the lab complex on his own.

The front door of the small, blocky building—almost a concrete bunker of sorts, with narrow windows that were few and far between—opened onto an anteroom with a rush of humidity-controlled air, and Karl took a deep breath, glad to get air in his lungs that wasn’t thick and swampy. Rosemary lead him through another door, the air beyond even dryer, and up a set of stairs to the second floor, down a hall, and through yet another door. The loudest noises were the sounds of their shoes on linoleum and the hum of the lights, followed by the low rush of air conditioning.

The door opened, revealing a reading room. A small amount of light filtered through a few of the narrow windows along one wall, but the rest of the lighting was bright florescent bulbs, both overhead and at individual workstations that were fitted out with lamps. Small doors lined the walls, presumably leading elsewhere in the building, or to individual reading rooms.

“Adriane in, Florence?” Rosemary called softly to the young woman who was sitting at what appeared to be a reference desk of sorts, sorting carefully through papers with white-gloved hands.

Florence grimaced at Rosemary. “Well, Miss Epps, she went into her office half an hour ago saying she wasn’t to be disturbed.”

Rosemary shot Florence a smile. “I’ll just pop my head in and see how she’s doing.”

“Your funeral,” Florence said, turning back to her papers with raised eyebrows.

“Well, she hasn’t murdered me yet,” said Rosemary, the volume of her voice going up a bit as she headed towards one of the doors next to the reference desk. Karl followed, getting close enough to see that it had a brass nameplate with the name and title “Adriane Dolmetsch, Head Archivist” inscribed on it. Rosemary knocked briskly at the door and then opened it, sticking her head into the room. “Yoo-hoo, Adriane! _Wie gehts, mein Schatz_?”

“What do you want this time, Rosmarin?” a deep and even-toned female voice responded.

“Marya’s arrived. I thought I’d introduce the two of you.”

Karl’s face twisted in consternation at the thought that she had been calling him Marya to other people. He had somehow enjoyed the thought of it being a joke between himself and Rosemary.

“…very well,” the voice responded, sounding grudging.

A tall, raw-boned woman, with brownish skin and greyish hair and eyes and beigeish everything else emerged from the office, staring down at Karl for a long moment that left him feeling as if she’d peeled back his skin in order to get a good look at what really made him tick. After that moment, she turned her attention to Rosemary and said, “He is not as impressive as I was expecting him to be.”

“No one is,” said Rosemary drily. “Dr. Kelley, Adriane Dolmetsch. Adriane, Dr. Karl Kelley.” Rosemary turned to the taller woman and thrust a finger at her. “I want you to play nice with him for a few weeks, Adriane.”

Adriane waved a white-gloved hand in his direction and turned to go back into her office. “Yes, very good, of course. You know that I only play nice as long as they play nice with me, Rosmarin.”

“He promises to be a good boy. Don’t you, Dr. Kelley?” Rosemary shot him a sly little grin and a wink.

“Er. Yes,” Karl stammered out, finally finding his tongue.

Adriane paused in the doorway to her office to turn and stare at him again, and he felt a cold shiver travel down his spine. “Indeed,” she said, and then disappeared once more into her office.

“Well, that went well!” Rosemary said in a cheery voice. “Let’s get out of here before she decides she actually took a disgust of you and comes back out to sear your flesh from your bones.”

“I heard that,” Adriane called through her office door.

Rosemary laughed, and called back, “ _Bis später, liebschen_!”

“I am neither your treasure nor your little love, Rosmarin!” came the returning shout. From her perch behind the reference desk, Florence was eying Rosemary with barely-disguised distress.

Rosemary laughed again and took Karl by the elbow, leading him out of the reading room. “Well. I think that went well,” she said as she shut the door behind them.

Karl, on the other hand, was feeling somewhat wrung-out by the encounter. And it had been an encounter—there were no other words for the experience of meeting the head archivist. “She seems, ah…”

“Nice?”

“The word I was looking for is terrifying.”

“Well, that too.” They’d made it out of the building by then, and instead of pausing as she had when they’d left the lab, Rosemary took off down one of the paths. “The key is to treat her with respect.”

Karl eyed Rosemary dubiously. “I am not entirely certain we have the same definition of the word respect,” he said.

“Well, there’s you, and then there’s me.” Rosemary grinned up at him. “See, she’s not allowed to ban _me_ from the archives.”

* * *

Rosemary’s pager beeped at her from one of her suit pockets as they made their way back to the lab building. She pulled it out to check the code and sighed. “Looks like there’s something high-priority waiting for me back at the lab. I’ll have to foist you off on my assistant once we get there, all right? He’ll make sure you get back to the apartments in one piece.”

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Kelley said. He was looking drawn and exhausted again; clearly he had not yet accustomed himself to the time difference.

Or perhaps he was still feeling the strain of the, ah, rather unusual way his recruitment had been covered up. Rosemary had managed to get her hands on one of the special ops fellows that Mr. Carter had taken with him to Russia the day before, after she’d sent Dr. Kelley back to bed; the scenario he’d described would have traumatized just about anyone, and Rosemary wasn’t entirely convinced that the dour Russian doctor hadn’t been suffering constantly from the side effects of repeated trauma even before then.

She would have to think about that. Rosemary thought that Dr. Kelley was probably made of some pretty stern stuff; after all, he’d survived Volgograd, and he’d survived the current political situation in Russia… but that sort of repeated trauma could have unexpected side effects. And Goddard Futuristics, for all that it was the place to be if you wanted to do _real_ research, the type that would change the world… well, Mr. Carter had always had a rather unusual management style, and it could take some getting used to. It had taken Rosemary three years to get to the point where she’d been able to let Mr. Keller’s insults and over-the-top threats roll off her like water off a duck’s back, and while the adjustment period had been a good deal shorter with Mr. Carter, it hadn’t exactly been _easy_.

And for a less resilient personality, one that had been broken again and again and pieced back together out of whatever pieces were left, that sort of handling could be disastrous.

Of course, Rosemary was probably worrying about nothing. She shot Dr. Kelley a brief glance; he’d remained quiet during the walk back to the lab building so far. She hoped she was misjudging him, that this version of him would disappear once he’d managed to sleep off his exhaustion and get into the swing of working at Goddard. But it always paid to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, and if he would need additional babysitting during his adjustment period, she needed to figure that out now.

Trauma. It all came down to trauma.

To Mr. Carter, trauma was something exploitable. He never hired someone new without knowing exactly what their breaking points were, and how he could use those breaking points to control that person.

So, was it better for her to lean in to the trauma? To desensitize him to it, by poking and prodding until he felt nothing at all, until Carter’s jabs meant nothing to him? Or was it better to smooth it over, to help him find ways to hide it?

Healing it was, of course, outside of Rosemary’s scope of expertise. But she’d become quite the expert at hiding trauma over the years, and she thought she might be able to offer him a pointer or two, if it came down to it.

She took him straight to Charles’ office when they got back to the lab complex. “What’s the emergency?”

“Pryce was looking for you. Something about the…” Charles trailed off, shooting a worried glance at Dr. Kelley. “Well, you know.”

Rosemary sighed. Charles could be referring to any one of a half-dozen projects. She’d have to go down to Pryce’s lab and find out for herself which it was. “All right. If she calls again, let her know I’m on my way. And here.” Rosemary detached a copy of her office key from the ring she kept in her suit pocket next to the beeper. “Dr. Kelley left a notebook in my office. You let him in there to get it, then you bring him straight back to the apartments, all right?”

Charles took the key and nodded. “All right, Miss Epps. Good luck with Dr. Pryce.”

Rosemary let out a light laugh that she wasn’t really feeling. “Oh, Charlie boy, you know _I_ don’t need luck with her. It’s the rest of the world that needs to watch out.”

She turned her back on Dr. Kelley and her assistant, immediately turning her mind to the extremely long list of potential tasks that might be awaiting her, and leaving just a little bit of room for Pryce to surprise her.

Though, as she headed down the stairs to the sub-basement where Pryce had her lab, she couldn’t quite help spending one more worried thought on the subject of Dr. Kelley.


	7. January 22nd, 1989: Labyrinth

By his third morning at Goddard Futuristics, Dmitri—no, Karl, he had to get used to calling himself by that name—felt as if he had almost adjusted to the time difference between St. Petersburg and Canaveral. The afternoon before, when Rosemary’s assistant returned him to his apartment, he’d settled down with the notes he’d taken earlier that day and worked out a research plan that would compensate for some of the weak points Rosemary had pointed out in his work on the Koschei Bessmertney Virus so far. And then, he’d tried one of the tv dinners (and had been thoroughly unimpressed) and had fallen into bed, exhausted.

But unlike his first two nights, he was not too exhausted to dream. His dreams had started as a nightmarish mishmash: flashes of the plane ride; looking down on his own corpse; wandering a tangled labyrinth of of paths through a jungle, breathing in air heavy with moisture; the strange gaze of the head archivist stripping him bare; Mr. Carter with his blue eyes and golden curls, looking like an angel and offering him a demon’s bargain.

And everywhere there was Rosemary, darting in and out, dragging him from one scene to another: sitting across from him in the plane, sipping a cup of coffee and chattering about the view out the window; examining his dead body and telling him he made a lovely corpse; taking him by the elbow and shoving through a waterfall of vines, out into bright sunlight; standing between him and the archivist, a finger outstretched as she scolded the other woman; stepping in and whisking him away from Mr. Carter and off into a wonderland of a lab.

“Come now, Marya,” the Rosemary in his dreams had said, leaning close and smiling at him with those red, red lips of hers. “Shackle death for me.”

Dmitri— _Karl—_ had woken in the middle of the night at that, soaked in sweat and gasping for breath. And then he remembered, for a brief moment, Rosemary’s hand on his shoulder that first night, telling him to sleep, telling him it would all sort itself out in his brain in the morning, and he slept once more. If he dreamed again that night, he did not remember his dreams, and he woke feeling strangely refreshed, given how restless the first part of his night had been.

Once he’d showered the dried sweat of the night off and dressed himself again, Karl decided he would try to find the cafeteria on his own. Rosemary’s assistant, Charles, had told him that the cafeteria remained open—albeit for more limited hours—on Sundays for those staff members who worked over the weekend and for the staff who lived on-site and didn’t care to cook for themselves. Karl did know how to cook, but the kitchen in his apartment, while fully-stocked with ready-made meals and granola bars, protein bars and bottled drinks, canned meats and bagged noodles, was woefully lacking in items he recognized as a ingredients for an actual meal. He supposed it made sense; perhaps they had not known when he would take possession of the apartment exactly, only that it would happen soon, and it wouldn’t have done to lay in perishable foods. But he would have to figure out the location of the campus store later in the day and do some shopping.

He headed out onto Goddard’s campus, and after a little bit of trial and error, made his way to the cafeteria. Clearly whoever made the coffee on Sunday mornings had higher standards than the person who had made it the day before; it was actually palatable. The eggs and sausage on offer, on the other hand… Karl shuddered, and opted for bread and butter and jam.

Heartened by his success with the cafeteria, Karl continued, trying to remember the round-about way Rosemary had taken to get to the campus store during their whirlwind tour. This, too, was eventually a success, despite the fact that he encountered three more picturesque water features on the way and had to sit down on a bench at at one for a while. In the end, it turned out that the campus store had even more limited hours on Sundays than the cafeteria, and had already closed. His stomach grumbling, Karl retraced his steps to the cafeteria for lunch, then made his way to the lab complex and back to the cafeteria again, making sure he wouldn’t find himself in front of any more picturesque water features the next time he made that particular trip.

Where else? He retraced his steps, returning to the apartment complex, but he’d had a second and third cup of coffee with lunch, and was too jittery to consider returning to his apartment for longer than it took to use the bathroom and gather up a few of the protein bars. So, as best as he could remember, he retraced the tour Rosemary had taken him on, trying to remember what all the buildings contained. That was the other thing about Goddard’s campus that was peculiar, other than the twisting paths and roadways that tied it together, crossing and re-crossing each other in a tangle that he was only starting to make sense of: none of the buildings were labeled. There were numbers on the interior doors in the apartment complex, and the labs and offices in the lab complex had plates on the doors with the names of the people who worked in them, but aside from that, he hadn’t seen any way to distinguish the buildings from one another other than their outwards appearance.

He reached the end of the tour having needed to backtrack only once, and, feeling quite proud of himself for the feat, he decided to try and find the Archives on his own.

After half an hour, he was sure it would be around the next twist in the path he was on, with its tall shrubs blocking him in on either side.

After an hour, he’d backtracked half a dozen times and had completely lost track of where he was, and it had been more than forty-five minutes since he’d seen another human being, even in passing. Worse, it was starting to get dark, and while there were lamps spotted here and there along the paths, there were still places where the shadows were deep.

Karl wasn’t afraid of the dark. But perhaps he was afraid of what might lurk in it. Belatedly, he remembered that Florida had alligators; there’d been a small note in his paperwork about what to do if he spotted one on campus, but right now his worry was that he wouldn’t spot one until he was right on top of it.

He could probably outrun an alligator, he thought. But he didn’t want to be in the position where he had to.

“You lost?” A booming baritone rang out behind him, and Karl turned, then took a step back. A giant of a man in well-fitted suit was looming out of the shadows behind him, looking down at Karl in a way that gave him the distinct impression that if he did not manage to answer this man in a satisfactory fashion, Karl would find himself in a rather large amount of pain.

“Well?” the man asked.

Karl realized he was gaping. “Er. Yes. I was trying to find the archives at first, but I have only been there once, and Rosemary walked very quickly…”

The man’s shoulders seemed to relax, though the rest of his posture was still on alert. Perhaps the man had a military background. “Ah, you’ll be Miss Rosie’s latest,” he drawled. “Come on, then. I’m headed to the apartments myself. Let’s get you back to where you belong.” The man turned away from Karl, then looked back over his shoulder. “Comin’?”

Karl scampered after the man, then fell in at his side. They walked silently for a few minutes, but eventually the man looked down at Karl curiously and spoke. “Virology, right? I remember Rosie sayin’ something about a virologist.”

“And radiology,” Karl said, frowning up at the man.

The man shrugged. “It’s all the same to me, though I’m sure Rosie would smack me upside the head for sayin’ so.”

Karl considered the mental image this statement caused, and found himself wondering how it would work. Would this man bend double so that Rosemary could reach his head to smack him, or would she have to scale him like a tree?

The man laughed, and Karl realized he’d said this thought out loud. “Depends on if I’m in a givin’ mood that day,” he said, smiling congenially down at Karl. “Sometimes I pick her up, if I’m feelin’ real friendly.”

Karl felt a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach. The way this man was talking, he was close with Rosemary. Very close. And as much as Karl had been telling himself not to consider Rosemary’s flirting as indicative that she was interested in him beyond them working together, as indicative of anything other than she wanted to coax him into revealing more of his personality so that she could get to know him… Well, he’d been lonely for a long time, that was all. And that had left him feeling strangely possessive of the affectionate teasing Rosemary had subjected him to in the few days since he’d met her.

Karl eyed the man and sighed. Well, who would be interested in Karl if they had a handsome ginger-haired giant of a man around? Especially one who looked like he could lift Rosemary in one arm and Karl in the other and not break a sweat. Karl could certainly see the appeal; he thought almost anyone interested in men would.

“And here we are!” The man gestured expansively ahead of them, where the lights from the apartment complex’s parking lot were shining through the trees. He followed Karl in through the front door and down the hall, then passed him to knock on Rosemary’s door. Karl made a fuss about unlocking his own door, fiddling with the ring of keys, pretending his key was stuck in the lock just long enough to see the next door down open and hear Rosemary’s cry of delight at the sight of the ginger giant on her doorstep.

Karl sighed again, and entered his apartment, resigning himself to yet another mediocre tv dinner.

* * *

“Al!” Rosemary threw her arms around her friend, pulling him further into her apartment. Al kicked the door shut behind him. “Oh, god. It’s been three months, hasn’t it?”

Al smiled and slung a heavy arm around her shoulders. “How’ve you been, Rosie?”

“All right,” Rosemary said, stepping back to look up at him. Al stooped and pressed a kiss to her cheek as she did. “I’m back to a full complement of scientists finally.”

“Oh, yeah? How’s that going?”

“All right,” Rosemary said again, and winced. Twice in a row. Al would notice that.

All Al did was raise his eyebrows and give her a skeptical look. “Think I ran into your new little lamb on my way here,” he said. “The fellow could use a sheepdog to keep him in line. Got lost on the way to the archives.”

“Shortish man, no hair, glasses?” Rosemary asked.

“Cheekbones you could cut glass with, lives next door?”

“That’s the fellow. He really tried to find the archives on his own?” Rosemary tried to keep the surprise out of her voice.

“How long has he been on campus?”

“He arrived Thursday night.”

“Ambitious fellow. Took me three weeks here before I felt comfortable tryin’ for the archives on my own,” Al said. “You’ll want to keep a close eye on him, Rosie.”

Rosemary felt her face heat. “I’ll be sure to, though I know for a fact that’s a thundering lie.”

Al grinned. “Now, Rosie, when have I ever lied to you?”

Rosemary tilted her head back so she could hit him with the full force of her glare. “All the damn time, but in particular just now, when you pretended that the layout of this campus isn’t your particular proclivity for over-the-top security measures in action.”

Al shrugged, then leaned down to Rosemary again, nuzzling up against her neck and stroking his hands down her arms to take her hands in his own. “Sorry, darlin’. Lyin’ just comes easy to me sometimes. What can I do to make it up to you?”

Rosemary let her thoughts go soft and fuzzy and turned to press a kiss to Al’s ear. “I can think of a thing or two,” she murmured.

Al laughed and scooped her up in his arms, and moments later had her flat on her back on top of her bed. And then, she let her brain stop working for the next little while, forgetting about everything outside of that moment.

* * *

Karl had just stuck his tv dinner in the microwave when he heard a loud shriek from next door. He was out of the kitchen in a second, then realized that he could hear Rosemary giggling now, even through the closed door of his bedroom and the wall beyond that separated their two apartments.

He knew better, but he opened the door of the bedroom anyway, and winced as the giggles quickly subsided into a low moan. More moans followed. Somewhere in the background, Karl’s microwave beeped, but he was frozen there in the doorway of his bedroom, listening as the giant man Rosemary had let into her apartment did what were apparently extremely pleasurable things to her. Or at least Karl assumed that was what was happening.

There was a hoarse, breathless little scream through the wall, then the low baritone of the man, words unintelligible. A moment of silence, and then the silence was replaced by more moaning, and the rhythmic thump of a bed against the wall.

Karl realized he’d been standing in the doorway to his bedroom for long enough that his tv dinner was probably cold all the way through again, rather than still frozen in the middle and molten around the edges. He let out a huff of breath, not quite a sigh, and shook his head, trying to shake some sense into himself.

Why had he listened to that? He hardly knew anything about Rosemary, beyond that she had gone out of her way to be kind to him and was shockingly intelligent, but now he knew what she sounded like when having sex.

Karl wasn’t sure he’d be able to look Rosemary in the eye in the morning.

He certainly wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye without wondering what it would be like to take the place of that man in Rosemary’s bed.


	8. January 23rd, 1989: Very Bad Russian

Karl readied himself by seven-thirty that morning, that odd, detached feeling back again despite the fact that he was considerably less sleep-deprived than when he’d arrived. He’d figured out the coffee maker in his apartment, more or less, though the resulting cups of coffee were a bit weak, and he’d choked down a granola bar for breakfast. Neither Rosemary nor Charles had given him instructions on what he was supposed to do with himself that day, but it was a Monday, so he suspected that either Rosemary would show up to drag him off to the lab building, or the phone in his apartment would ring sometime soon and someone would provide him with instructions.

It was the former; a brisk knock on his door at a few minutes before eight revealed Rosemary, standing in the hall of the apartment complex, ready for work herself. She looked him over and nodded in approval, no doubt because this time she didn’t have to wait for him to put his shoes on. And then, she whisked him off to the lab complex again.

Karl found he couldn’t quite bear to look at her directly, so instead he retreated into stiff formality, providing single-word answers to her queries about how his Sunday had gone, whether he’d slept well, how he was feeling.

Was Rosemary aware of how thin that wall was, between her bedroom and his own? Did she know he’d heard her the night before?

If she did know, she was doing an excellent job of pretending she didn’t. He would have expected caution or embarrassment from her, but she was treating him with the same casual, flirtatious manner as she had before.

“Just so you know what’s expected from you today, we’re going to have a quick meeting first, and then I’ll take you to your lab and introduce you to your lab techs. They’ve been hard at work all weekend with the viral samples you provided and a batch of mice, so I imagine you’ll want to spend the day checking the work they’ve done so far and working on a proposal for what happens next.”

“I have already been thinking about that,” he offered up, waving the notepad she’d given him on Saturday in her direction.

“Excellent. It’s always best to hit the ground running when starting a new job, isn’t it?” Rosemary opened the front door of the lab complex with her keycard and Karl opened the door for her, feeling his face flush when she beamed a smile up at him along with a cheerful “Thanks!”

Another minute, and he was sitting across the desk from Rosemary in her office as she shuffled through a few papers, perching the reading glasses she had on a chain around her neck on her nose and peering down at them. She cleared her throat and shot him another blinding smile that left him blushing again, despite the fact that he still couldn’t quite manage to meet her eye. “So. The first thing to know about your lab techs is that you’ve technically only got a half-share of their time. Aditi’s microbiology, mostly, and she’s normally with Dr. Dominguez on the fourth floor, and Andrew usually works with the chemists in the building. But both of them have experience with animal testing, and both of them aren’t being fully utilized in their other labs, so you’re a growth experience for them, and you’ll be able to pull them in full time as necessary if you have need of their help.”

Karl nodded, and Rosemary continued. “The other thing to keep in mind is that neither of them have a high enough clearance level to know about the human testing that Goddard does. I know that’s probably a ways off for you, but it’s something you need to be careful about, all right?”

Karl nodded again, and, because she seemed to be waiting for some further acknowledgement, added a stiff “Of course.”

“All right. As long as you’re clear on that. Now, you said that you’d already been working on a proposal for where this is going from here?”

Karl nodded yet again.

“Well, give it here,” Rosemary said, sounding impatient and holding her hand out for his notepad.

Karl looked down at his messy scrawl of Russian cursive. “Er.”

“Is there a problem, Dr. Kelley?”

“It is simply that I prefer to work in my native tongue when I am, what is word…”

“Brainstorming?” Rosemary suggested.

“That sounds right,” Karl said.

“I’ll let you know if your handwriting is illegible,” Rosemary said, still holding her hand out for the notepad, “But the language it’s written in should not be an issue.”

Karl flipped to the page of the notepad where he’d started his notes on the research proposal and handed it to Rosemary, shooting her a dubious look as he did. Rosemary simply smiled at him, then turned her attention to the notepad, uncapping a fountain pen and using it to trace her location in his notes, scrawling a note or two of her own in English as she made her way through. At the end, she nodded, then capped the pen and handed the notepad back to him. “Looks good. Get that written up all nice and neat in English for me. Carter will want a report.”

Karl blinked, and read one of her notes. He shouldn’t have been surprised to find it relevant to the section of his own notes that it was scrawled next to, but he was. “ _A ty govorish' po russki_?” he asked, looking at her straight on for the first time that morning.

“ _Ochen' plokhoy russkiy_ ,” came Rosemary’s response, the consonants too dull, the vowels strange, but recognizably Russian.

“I see,” Karl said, still startled, and suddenly he couldn’t resist teasing her. “I shall have to watch what I say around you.”

Rosemary shot him an arch look. “Indeed you shall.” She set down the pen, which she’d been fiddling with since handing his notepad back, and removed her reading glasses, folding them and letting them drop to her chest. “Let’s head to your lab and get you going, shall we?”

* * *

Using Al like that had been a nasty trick, Rosemary had thought as Dr. Kelley opened his door to her that morning. Not that Al minded being used that way, of course, but as she watched Dr. Kelley turn stiff and overly polite under her gaze, as he avoided looking her way, as he answered her questions with as few words as possible, Rosemary was hard-pressed not to regret it. But Rosemary had needed it, that evening with Al. Not just to relieve some of the pent-up lust her strange attraction to Dr. Kelley had caused, but for the effect it had on Dr. Kelley as well, throwing up a wall of formality between the two of them.

Three men. Three men, and occasional visits to a female prostitute. All in all, it pointed towards a man who was interested in other men, and even if he weren’t technically her subordinate and out-of-bounds for that reason, the knowledge of his past relationships should have made it easy to remember that he wasn’t for her. But it hadn’t been easy, not when he’d smiled that strange little smile of his at her, with his eyes lighting up behind the thick black frames of his glasses. It hadn’t been easy, not when he seemed to be responding to her casual flirting with cautious forays of his own.

Rosemary thought she’d just been a little pent up. She’d had a relationship of sorts with another lab manager, Charlotte, for a few years, the two of them getting together to relieve tension from time to time by fucking each other senseless, but there hadn’t been anything beyond that. When Charlotte had left for the Antartica research lab six months ago, Rosemary had been able to bid her farewell without any emotion to it. Since then… well, Al was always up for a good time, but he was off on one information-gathering mission or another far too often, or off investigating security threats, or in someone else’s bed. And Rosemary hadn’t quite clicked with anyone else since Charlotte.

She was too close to Pryce and Carter, that was the problem. She’d heard the rumors, that she was the toy of one or the other of them, or perhaps even both at once. She’d heard herself called Carter’s favorite bitch—hell, Dr. Messer, the pharmacist who’d been in Dr. Kelley’s lab up until nine months ago, when her rotation on Janus Station had started, had gone so far as to call Rosemary that to her face. And while Rosemary knew people in other departments, she didn’t get out of the lab complex for long enough to scope them out as potential partners except for special occasions, like the company Christmas party.

So for now, she’d keep making do with Al’s spare minutes and be grateful for them.

Last night, those minutes had been necessary. Necessary to relieve her own tension, necessary to make sure Dr. Kelley thought she already had someone in her bed, necessary to put that boundary in place before she was tempted to do something she’d regret and feel Dr. Kelley out to find out just how interested in men he was, and whether women might be an option he’d consider as well. And there was no space for regret in that decision.

Regret still threatened, though, when his eyes lit up at her clumsy attempt at Russian, when he’d smiled and said he’d have to watch what he said around her.

The introduction to Aditi and Andrew went well enough. Both techs seemed to be somewhat in awe of Dr. Kelley; Rosemary had made sure to brief them on some of his former projects, albeit in language that heavily disguised them and removed them from the context of Dmitri Vologin. Of course, they were young, and Aditi was planning to go back for her doctorate in a year or two. Rosemary supposed she would have been equally in awe of someone with Dr. Kelley’s record, back when she’d first started working as a lab tech herself.

Rosemary left Dr. Kelley checking over their work with the mice and left the lab complex, headed towards the admin building at a brisk walk. She owed Mr. Carter a report on Dr. Kelley’s first few days at Goddard, and she was running a few minutes late for it.

Well, all right, she would most likely get to his office at their appointed time, but Carter was the sort of man you waited on, not the sort you kept waiting, and he expected people to arrive early for their meetings with him, just in case he was ready for you then. He never was, of course, but that didn’t stop them all from catering to his whims. After all, the suite of CEOs might ostensibly run Goddard Futuristics, but it was William Carter who was the nerve center of the company, sitting in the Communications Department like a spider in the middle of a web, waiting to pounce at any hint of disorder out on the strands that lead through every other department and straight through his hands. And anyone who forgot this didn’t manage to stay a part of the company for very long.

Rosemary was panting by the time she reached the anteroom to Carter’s office. His secretary, another William, who went by Bill to avoid confusion, shot her a look over the top of his glasses, but she’d shaved off a few minutes on the way over and had just enough time to start breathing properly and run fingers through her wig to smooth it down before Carter’s voice echoed over the intercom, asking Bill to send her in.

She sat in one of the chairs in front of Carter’s desk and set her file on Dr. Kelley down. “Good morning, sir.”

“Rosemary. I take it your new pet is settling in?”

Rosemary nodded. “I believe so, sir, though it may take another week or so for the ball to get rolling on his research, as it were.”

“Hm. But he’s adjusting well to his new circumstances?”

“I don’t know that we’ll ever make an American of him, and I think that living in a swamp is going to be a bit of an adjustment, but… he’ll do.” Rosemary glanced down at the file for a brief moment, considering. “He’s likely to be the sort to cling to lab work in lieu of interacting with the outside world, I suspect.”

“What makes you say that?” One of Carter’s eyebrows shot up quizzically.

Rosemary glanced at the file again, thinking over the contents, the notes on her interview with Dr. Kelley that it contained. “He’s… I’m not quite sure how to put it.” She tapped a finger on the arm of her chair as she considered. “That virus is wife, child, and religion to him,” she said finally, doing her best to keep her reluctance to reveal something so personal about Dr. Kelley out of her voice. She hadn’t quite said it in those words in her notes, but Carter knew her style well enough to read between the lines and come to that conclusion himself. “Making it work matters more than anything else to him, and more than that, he _believes_ in it. Truly and deeply, with more certainty than he believes in anything else, I think.”

“I see. _Well._ That’s definitely information worth knowing about our dear Dr. Kelley.” Carter finally reached across the desk for the file she’d brought with her, and started flipping through it, pausing here or there to scan a paragraph or two. “I thought it might be something of that sort when I met him myself, but it’s good to get a second opinion,” he added. He looked up at Rosemary sharply. “Will he take direction?”

Rosemary nodded. “Better than some others, I think. He seemed almost excited to have his research so far ripped apart. Threw himself right in to stitching it back together in a new form, and I think his work on the Koschei Bessmertny virus will be stronger for it.”

Carter winced. “We really do need to do some rebranding there.”

Rosemary remained silent. She liked the name, or she had since Adriane had explained the reference to her, though she supposed it would be impenetrable to most people.

“I was thinking… _Decima._ ” Carter said, like a magician revealing the result of a trick.

Rosemary snorted. “Sounds like a sports car.”

“From the sound of things, it’s the sports car of retroviruses. Powerful and _fast._ ”

“Fair enough,” Rosemary said with a little nod. The information they had on the previous trials of the Koschei Bessmertny virus had indicated that it was still rather volatile. “I’ll run it by Dr. Kelley.”

“No, no. I think Decima is it. Let him know.” Carter flipped through the file again, then shut it with a nod. “You’ll get another report to me when things get underway properly, won’t you?”

Rosemary knew that, despite the fact that this was phrased as a question, it was really an order. “Of course, sir. Will that be all?”

“For today.” Carter waved his hand dismissively, and Rosemary left, making her way back to the lab complex.

Andrew was in tears, hiding in Charles’ office, waiting for her to get back. “I won’t work with that man,” he declared, his voice hoarse.

Rosemary frowned. “What happened?”

“I just reached in to get one of the mice out for him to inspect and it bit me and got loose, and he laid into me, said I was ignoring proper lab protocol. Then he started shouting at me in Russian. I got out of there after that.”

Rosemary sighed. She’d have to get some live traps up to Dr. Kelley’s lab. “Andrew, you do realize you’re not working with pharmaceuticals here, right? That mouse has the potential to spread the retrovirus to anyone it comes in contact with, once the incubation period is over.”

Andrew hiccuped and looked down at his hand with an expression of terror.

Rosemary sighed again and patted him on the shoulder. “Two weeks. We’ve got two weeks to catch it again. You’re going to be fine. But if you really think you can’t work with him, we’ll find some other way for you to stretch your legs a bit, all right?”

Andrew nodded. “Thank you, Miss Epps.”

“Yes, well, go over to the medical complex and get someone to look at that bite,” Rosemary said. “Just because you’re not going to die from a retrovirus doesn’t mean it might not get infected.”

Andrew left Charles’ office, and Charles sighed. “I did tell him it was going to be all right, but…”

“It’s fine, Charles. He’s a little more high-strung than I remember him being last time I talked to him, though. You know anything about that?”

Charles gave Rosemary a guilty look and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “Well…”

“He finally told his parents about the two of you, didn’t he,” Rosemary said, sighing yet again. “Well, it had to be done, I suppose. They strike him from the family tree?”

“Something like that,” Charles said. “I mean, I’m glad, a little bit, because it means that he’s finally moving in with me, but then I feel guilty about feeling glad, and…”

“Don’t. You deserve a little bit of happiness, the two of you,” Rosemary said, keeping the sudden rush of envy she felt out of her voice. Two young people in love, doing what people in love had always done, and finding a way to be together. She wished them luck, she really did, but all the same they made her feel… old. Sad. Alone.

She shoved the thought down. Time to get back to work. “I’m going to check in on Dr. Kelley and make sure he hasn’t sent Aditi into hysterics as well, then I’ll be in my office for the afternoon,” she said to Charles.

“I’ll make sure to snag a sandwich for you when the cafeteria sends them over,” Charles said, smiling at Rosemary, a smile almost as blinding as the fake corporate one Rosemary used to dazzle people. But this smile was all real, all joy, and for a moment that feeling of being alone threatened to overwhelm Rosemary again. She forced a blinding smile of her own to her face, then whirled away, ready to make herself so busy that such a feeling wouldn’t be able to latch on to her the way this one seemed to be trying to do.

* * *

Karl had given up on locating the mouse half an hour ago and had sent Aditi off to the other scientist she worked for. Since then, he had been sitting at the computer in the little side room that served as an office and was trying to turn his notes into a reasonable approximation of a research proposal, but the thought of the loose mouse, with the Koschei Bessmertny virus incubating inside it, niggled at his brain, and he kept stalking out into the main lab, peering under tables, hoping he’d catch sight of it darting from one hiding place to another.

He was down on his hands and knees, peering behind a piece of lab equipment he hadn’t quite managed to discover the purpose of yet, when Rosemary appeared in his lab with a jar of peanut butter and a box that had pictures of live traps for rodents on the side.

“So you made a man cry today. Nice start,” she said, her voice a little tart.

Karl frowned, and got to his feet. “I am sorry, but—”

“No need to explain yourself to me,” Rosemary interrupted, setting the box of traps down on one of the tables in the lab. “I understand why you did it, and it was probably necessary.” She sighed, and split the tape holding the box shut with a key, then returned the keyring to her jacket pocket. “I’m just a little put out right now because I’m the one who has to deal with the aftermath. Andrew’s saying he won’t work with you.”

“I am sure Miss Korai will be more than sufficient for my needs,” Karl said stiffly. “I prefer to work alone, and if, as you say, they do not have clearance for the, ah, more delicate parts of my research…”

Rosemary pulled a trap out of the box and slammed it down on the tabletop, hard. “Does it require a Ph.D. to feed mice, Dr. Kelley?”

“…what?”

“How about to monitor and record symptoms and viral progression? To administer viral antibodies? To clean out cages? To dispose of the bodies, once they’ve served their purpose?” A second trap and then a third trap hit the tabletop, just as hard as the first had.

“I don’t understand,” Karl said, starting to get frustrated

“You’re here because we want to make use of your brain, Dr. Kelley, not to care for _mice._ ” A plastic knife appeared out of somewhere, and Rosemary was using it to bait the traps with globs of peanut butter. “We’re not paying you to waste your time or our money like that.”

“ _Ty suka_!” Karl exclaimed, almost angry now.

Rosemary shot him a sardonic look. “I’m sorry, did the flirting fool you? Of course I’m a bitch. I’ve worked for Carter for fourteen years, remember?” She turned back to the traps and finished setting them up. “And I’ll have to ask you _not_ to call me a bitch in a language I understand going forward.”

The brief surge of anger Karl had felt drained away, replaced by curiosity and confusion. “What, so you are happy to be called a bitch, provided you do not know the language it is said in?”

“Something like that,” Rosemary said, her tone of voice no longer irritated, looking up and shooting him a mischievous little grin. “Let’s just say I’ve been trying to find out exactly how many languages Adriane knows how to speak and curse words are the most annoying way I can think of to find out.”

Karl let out a chuckle at the thought of Rosemary going toe-to-toe with the intimidating archivist, curse words on her lips, and Rosemary’s grin grew a little broader.

“Where do you think we ought to put these?” she asked, holding up one of the traps.

“I think the mouse scurried off that way,” Karl said, gesturing a little further down the wall from the piece of equipment he’d been examining. “But we lost sight of it quickly, and I have not seen it since.”

“Right. Two traps along that wall for now, then, behind all the equipment, and one on the opposite side of the room. And we’ll take a look tomorrow and decide on a new strategy if this hasn’t been effective.” She crossed to him and handed him one of the traps, then wandered off to place the two she'd kept ahold of.

Karl found himself staring at her backside as she bent over to place one of the traps, then shook his head to clear it. _I really need to stop doing that_ , he told himself as he crouched down to place his own trap behind the piece of machinery he’d been examining when Rosemary had come into the room.

“I had a little talk with Mr. Carter this morning,” she said conversationally as she placed the trap on the other side of the room. “He thinks we ought to change the name of the virus to Decima.”

“Decima?” Karl asked, dubious.

“Yeah, I know.” Rosemary turned and came back his way, stopping at the lab table and leaning forwards against it, her arms crossed in front of her. “But I was thinking about it, on the walk back over here. Decima.” Her voice had turned thoughtful, and her gaze was distant, looking off to some far corner of the ceiling as she tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “One out of every ten,” she said, her eyes focusing suddenly and fiercely on Karl’s face. He found his gaze caught by hers, and couldn’t look away. “That’s how many of the original inhabitants survived Volgograd. How many of the children who born within ten years of the meltdown survived to adulthood. One out of every ten, and those are odds you beat.” She lifted her chin, as if challenging him. “So. Decima. For that one out of every ten. For the odds you intend to beat again.”

Karl couldn’t think of how to answer her, and in any case, he thought his mouth might had gone too dry to allow him to speak. So instead he nodded.

“I suppose I can’t call you Marya any more,” Rosemary said, smiling at him. “Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted.” She pushed herself away from the table and twisted her head from side to side, popping her neck. “I’m off to my office to reorganize schedules and see if I can find someone else to deal with the mice when Aditi’s not available, all right? And you just get back to putting together that research proposal for me.”

Karl nodded again, and a few moments later, Rosemary was gone again, sweeping the force of her personality after her like a cloak, leaving his lab feeling strangely empty in her wake. After a few long moments, Karl shook his head to clear it again, then returned to his office and got back to work.


	9. January 23rd, 1989: Prodigal Mouse

Rosemary had appeared back in his lab later in the afternoon, to check the traps and check his progress on the proposal. She leaned against the desk next to him, her reading glasses perched on her nose, her arm pressed against his as she read his work so far off the computer screen. Karl offered to stand up and let her have the chair, but she shook her head. "I'll just be a moment longer," she said, reaching in front of him to use the arrow keys to scroll her way down the contents of the word processor.

"You could at least use the mouse." Karl said, shoving his chair back from the desk to give her a little more space.

"Nah, I hate using right-handed mice. I always forget that the buttons are the other way around," she answered in a distracted tone of voice. She finished scanning his work so far, and nodded, then turned her head to look at him. "Good. The right level of detail for me, and clear enough I can condense it for Mr. Carter. Your English is excellent, by the way."

"Thank you," Karl said, feeling awkward, still uncomfortable meeting Rosemary's eye, but feeling as if he should. Fortunately, his stomach interjected by growling loudly, and Rosemary sighed and glared at his midsection over the top of her reading glasses.

"You worked through lunch, didn't you." It wasn't a question.

"I suppose I did."

"Right. Cafeteria. Now."

"I would like to finish this up first—"

"Dr. Kelley," Rosemary said, her voice stern in a way that went straight to his hindbrain and demanded compliance. "I'm willing to put up with a lot from the scientists I work with, but missing meals when there isn't an immediately pressing deadline to justify working through them is _not_ something I tolerate."

"Yes, ma'am," Karl said in a small voice. He stood up from the desk, stretching briefly and then heading towards the door of the lab, Rosemary a few paces ahead of him. He glanced around the main lab briefly when they exited the small side office. "Have the traps been effective?"

Rosemary shook her head as she pushed out the main lab door. "Not yet. My guess is the little bugger's still feeling pretty cautious, though. Hopefully she'll get her courage back after the lights go out tonight." She paused in the hallway once the lab door was shut behind them. "You've been keeping that side lab shut up tight, right?"

Karl had been so overwhelmed by the main lab, full of gleaming instruments he only half recognized, that he'd completely forgotten about the side lab, made over in the image of his lab back in Russia. He nodded.

"Thank goodness. One less place to look. I think I'll bring up another batch of traps while you're at lunch, though, and stick one in your office."

Karl nodded again, then realized that Rosemary had turned away too soon to see it, and added, "Yes, that sounds like good idea."

They parted ways on the second floor landing, Rosemary checking in briefly to make sure he could make it to the cafeteria on his own. "I could go grab Charles if you need a guide," she said.

Karl shook his head, and managed to look at her properly and offer up a little smile. "I will be fine. Thank you."

Rosemary shot him her dazzling smile in return, then disappeared onto the second floor, and Karl continued on his way to the cafeteria. The weather was a little more brisk today than it had been over the weekend, but it was still uncomfortably humid, and his glasses fogged over the moment he stepped out of the controlled environment of the lab building. He took them off, cleaning them carefully on the edge of his shirt, then sighed. Not because of the glasses, of course, but because of Rosemary and that smile of hers.

Turning forty had changed the way he had approached his work. For the past three and a half years, he'd set everything else aside; his friendships, such as they had been, had deteriorated, and he hadn't left himself any time for sexual interactions with other people either. His relationship with his research partner was the only strong connection he'd had left by the time Mr. Carter had come along with his offer, and lately even Kostya had been making noises about Dmitri being too focused, too engrossed in his work on Koschei Bessmertny. But what else could he do? He'd started to feel the press of time more and more, joints that no longer worked as well as they once had, a mind that succumbed to the fog of exhaustion far more easily than it had in the past, after he'd spent too many late nights in the lab.

But Rosemary's friendly regard, even when mixed in with the sharp sarcasm and sternness she'd been using to keep him in line... well. It made him think that perhaps he missed having connections with other people.

And his attraction to Rosemary's body and his reaction to the noises he'd heard through the wall of his bedroom the other night left him certain that he'd been missing sex.

Karl considered again, whether Goddard might be willing to provide for that particular physical need as handily as it had provided for the others, but immediately discarded the thought. Who would he even ask? Mr. Carter? He shuddered at the thought. Rosemary? Ah, yes, clearly the way to get off on the right foot with his lab manager, walking up to her and asking whether the company would provide him with sexual companionship alongside his room, board, and salary. Karl snorted. It would have to be an unusual company indeed, to provide that sort of thing for its employees. He had no doubt that the truth of it was that if he wanted sex, he would have to find it on his own, or be content with taking himself in hand.

Perhaps he would find a kindred spirit, or at least someone else who was as lonely as he was, somewhere among the other scientists in the building. He had no doubt that Rosemary would eventually take care of introducing him to the other people in the building as efficiently as she'd taken care of everything else so far.

And perhaps then, Rosemary's flirtatious manner would not affect him so.

When Karl returned to his lab, another sandwich with an excess of condiments sitting heavily in his gut, a live trap had appeared under his desk and there was a floppy disk sitting next to the computer. A post-it was stuck to the top of the floppy disk. "Bring the proposal by my office when you're done!" said the scrawl of Rosemary's handwriting, and the sight of it quirked the corners of his mouth into a smile.

He sat down and worked.

* * *

When Rosemary returned to her office after setting the second bunch of live traps in Dr. Kelley's office, a memo had appeared in the file holder attached to her door. She picked it up and scanned the contents as she unlocked her door, then threw it down on her desk with a scowl. Mr. Carter had refused her request for the budget to hire a new lab tech for the second time since Rosemary had first gotten Dr. Kelley's file and started setting up his lab. She suspected this repeated refusal was just out of caprice; after all, two months ago, Carter had refused her a new lab tech and offered her whatever budget she thought necessary to make over Dr. Messer's old lab from one meant for pharmaceutical research, all in the same breath.

Perhaps Carter thought she was getting lazy. He'd certainly noticed her increased boredom and irritability over the past nine months, as having an empty lab on her hands and one fewer scientist to manage wore on her. She liked to be busy.

It kept her from thinking.

She pulled a pile of staff files out of one of her filing cabinets and sat down at her desk with them, along with a copy of everyone's schedule. Time to figure out if she could move a few shifts around...

Some hours later, frustrated and with a thundering headache, Rosemary glanced up at the clock on her desk. She frowned, then shoved up her sleeve and checked her wristwatch as well. Eight thirty, and no sign of Dr. Kelley with the research proposal he'd been working on. Given what he'd achieved that morning, he should have been done by now. Or at least he should have had better luck in finishing his task than she was having in finding someone both qualified and of the right clearance level to take on some of the menial work in his lab.

Other than herself, that was.

She sighed and stood. Well, time for her to head out anyway; she usually threw together a casserole or something of the sort over the weekend to serve as dinner throughout the week, but she hadn't felt up to it this past Sunday, which meant it was time to get to the cafeteria before it closed so that she'd have something other than a protein bar to eat for dinner. Might as well gather up Dr. Kelley and his research proposal on the way.

Rosemary did a circuit of the fifth floor before heading to Dr. Kelley's lab, checking for signs of life. Dr. Weiss was still in his lab, but that was only to be expected; he was running an overnight observation cycle, and he'd stopped by to check in with Rosemary on his way to his own evening meal. But other than that, the only other light on the floor came from Dr. Kelley's lab, shining mistily through the frosted glass window over his door into the dim hallway now that most of the lights in the building were off for the night. Rosemary knocked and then used her keycard to get in, coming to a halt just inside the door. Dr. Kelley was over near the large, clear-fronted cabinet that maintained a stable environment for the plastic cages of mice within. He was holding one of the mice, checking it over, rubbing a gloved thumb between its ears soothingly and muttering small nothings in Russian.

"Oh, hello," Rosemary said, forgetting her headache in an instant. "Has our prodigal mouse come home?"

Dr. Kelley looked her way and nodded. "I was just about to leave, come to you with proposal. Heard it protesting the size of the trap." He glanced at the cages in front of him, then her way, and Rosemary came over, snagging a pair of latex gloves out of the box he'd left on a table before giving him a hand with getting the mouse back in its cage. It ran back and forth, squeaking, then settled down and started grooming its face, and both Rosemary and Dr. Kelley stood watching it for a moment.

"Well. That's good, then. I'll get the traps out of here tomorrow morning."

"I could bring them to you—"

"Dr. Kelley, do we need to have another talk about which tasks, exactly, you require a Ph.D. for and which you do not?"

Dr. Kelley looked a little cowed, but persisted. "You are clearly much more in demand than I am," he argued, stripping the gloves off and disposing of them before heading towards the little office that was attached to his lab. "It does not make sense for you to be taking care of such a task."

"Well, no, usually I'd leave it to a lab tech or a janitor, but Dr. Dominguez needs Aditi all day tomorrow, and the janitor won't be in until Wednesday night, assuming you don't make a mess of things in the meantime." Rosemary disposed of her own gloves and followed him, leaning against the frame of the door into his office, watching as he saved his research proposal to the floppy she'd left for him. "So I'll be on mouse-feeding duty tomorrow anyway. Might as well take care of the traps while I'm at it."

Dr. Kelley ejected the disk, looking up at Rosemary with a frown. "You really do not have another lab tech experienced in animal trials?"

"Not anyone who has the right clearance level and who isn't already working full-time for someone else," she said with a little one-shouldered shrug. "I figure I'll manage to wear Mr. Carter down on the subject of the budget for lab tech salaries in another month or so, but until then it's going to have to be whatever time I can spare and a half-share of Aditi, unless I can convince Dr. Solomon to take Andrew on a few hours a week in exchange for James. But Dr. Solomon's even more brusque than you are, so I doubt she'll be a good fit for Andrew."

Dr. Kelley was giving her a blank look, and Rosemary realized she'd been rattling on about names that he had no context for. She sighed and shut her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Sorry. I've been locked up in my office trying to juggle the schedule around for the past few hours and it's left me more than a little frustrated. Just airing some of that frustration out before it festers. Don't mind me."

"I do not mind," Dr. Kelley said, his voice a little husky. She opened her eyes and glanced his way, and he was giving her a strange look that left her feeling peculiar. A small shiver ran down her spine—not an unpleasant one—and she was suddenly very aware of the fact that, since Dr. Weiss's lab was on the other end of the floor, they were essentially alone here.

Rosemary cleared her throat and looked down at her watch. "Time to go get something to eat before the cafeteria closes!" she said in a cheery voice, not looking up at Dr. Kelley again before turning and heading towards the door to his lab. She heard his footsteps behind her and he caught her at the door, the floppy disk clutched in his hand.

"Here," he said, handing the disk over.

"Care to join me for dinner?" She didn't want company in her current mood, but the words slipped out anyway, and she found herself thinking that maybe Dr. Kelley's company, at least, would be tolerable. Or at least he had tolerated her babbling about schedules with equanimity, and that was more than she could say for anyone else, even Charles, whose job it actually _was_ to listen to her babble about schedules.

Dr. Kelley shook his head. "I wish to check over mice once more. Be sure nothing is wrong. And check remaining viral samples for viability."

"Want me to bring you something, then?"

He hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "Thank you. No need to come back here, though. I will return to apartments in hour or so."

"I'll get something to go and bring it over when I hear your keys in the lock, then." Rosemary found herself thinking that it was remarkably considerate of Dr. Kelley, to not make her backtrack to the lab complex with a meal for him, when every other scientist she managed would think nothing of asking that of her. She beamed up at him as she said "See you later!" and turned to leave, suddenly aware that her headache had disappeared entirely at some point over the past few minutes. Strange, that.

The smile didn't dissipate as Rosemary made her way back down to her office to leave the floppy for the next morning, and despite the frustration of her afternoon, despite the annoyance she felt about the need to play lab tech until she managed to argue Mr. Carter around to letting her hire someone new, she left the lab complex with far more bounce in her step than she usually had at that time of day.

* * *

Karl shook off the stunned feeling that Rosemary's smile had left him with once she was out the door of his lab. He hadn't realized until that moment that she hadn't once smiled properly at him up until now, hadn't realized that all of the other smiles she'd given him hadn't reached her eyes until this one _had_. He still wasn't breathing properly as he pulled on another pair of latex gloves, as he opened the first of the mouse cages, as he examined the creature and made notes on the front of its enclosure with a wax pencil. By the third mouse he was calmer, and by the time he had taken a look at them all he'd regained his equilibrium, but he was still unsettled by the experience.

Did Rosemary know how powerful that smile of hers was?

There were no signs of advanced viral progression among the mice yet; most likely a good sign. The most recent batch of lab rats he'd worked with in Russia, more than half had shown signs of infection by this point, the virus moving far too quickly for him to do much to induce viral mutations, to try treatments before the rats died. He moved on to the refrigeration unit that held viral samples, and took them out, testing one by one, preparing slides and peering at them through the powerful microscope that seemed to be one of the centerpieces of the main room of the lab. Only a few seemed to still be viable, and he sighed in frustration. Koschei Bessmertny— _Decima,_ he reminded himself—had proven to be remarkably fragile outside of test subjects. He'd suspected that most of the samples he'd taken from his lab in Russia would not survive the trip to America, but this was fewer than he'd projected, even taking into account the number of samples that must have been used to infect the mice. He would have to manufacture more.

It was after ten when he finally made his way back to the apartments, but as he opened his apartment door Rosemary poked her head out of her apartment, offering him up another of those styrofoam containers. "It's a bit, well..." She gave him an apologetic smile and a little shrug. "Sad, I suppose, is the operative word. All that was left by the time I got there was a rather tragic lasagne and some over-cooked spinach. But it's almost real food."

He thanked her and took the container, fleeing into his apartment and shutting the door behind himself, then leaning back against it with a sigh. At some point since returning to the apartment building, Rosemary had removed her jacket and the colorful ascot she'd been wearing during the day and had undone the top few buttons of her prim blouse... and the hint of cleavage this had uncovered left Karl's mind lingering again on how damned attractive he found her.

And how she was definitely off limits.


	10. Chapter 10

Rosemary had been woken up at 3 a.m. by a call from Dr. Pryce, who needed a hand on some of the adjustments for her latest set of prototype eyes. By the time they were sitting properly in their sockets and providing all the input Pryce had hoped they would, it was late enough that Rosemary decided to head up to Dr. Kelley's lab and take care of the mice before it was time to go haul Dr. Kelley in to work.

She paused outside of Dr. Weiss's lab and knocked gently. "Still alive in there, Weiss?"

"Doing splendidly, Rosemary," came the deep rumble of his voice through the door. "Good results so far, though I look forward to when it will be safe enough to emerge for coffee."

"Glad to hear it. And I'll have Charles put a thermos outside your door when he gets in," she called back. Weiss's fervent " _Engelein_!" followed her as she continued down the hall to Kelley's lab.

The mice were mostly asleep, and although a few woke and scampered about when she turned on the lights in the glass-fronted enclosure that held all their individual cages, most remained drowsy as she pulled them out one-by-one, settling each in a small plastic box for the time it took to clean its cage out. "Let's see," she muttered to herself as she looked the list on the front of the enclosure over. "Stool samples, blood samples, regular dry diet for everyone, distilled water in the bottles." She smiled indulgently down at the mice. "And fresh pine chips for everyone."

Rosemary made quick work of the cages, labeling the samples with the number of the mouse that they belonged to. One of the numbers on the cages had been crossed out and had been labeled, in wax pencil, with PM, much to Rosemary's confusion, until halfway through the cages she remembered her off-hand comment about a prodigal mouse from the night before and laughed.

It had been years since she'd done work of this sort in a lab, but Rosemary's hands remembered the actions, and it was easy to fall into a mindless pattern. Scoop the mouse out, check carefully for abrasions, take a temperature, a blood sample, prep the slide, weigh the mouse, record everything, mark the lot with the date and time of observation. Sequester the mouse in a clean little box, select a stool sample from the cage, bag it, label it. Dump the waste from the bottom of the cage, sluice it off, stick it in the machine that dried it in an instant, fill the bottom with pine chips, return the mouse. Swap to a fresh pair of gloves and begin again. She was on the last mouse when she happened to glance up at the clock on the wall. Quarter past eight.

"Damn." She scooped the mouse out of the box she'd had it in for safekeeping and dumped it back in its cage, returning it to its row in the glass enclosure. "Time for me to go fetch your lord and master from his bed, children."

Rosemary disposed of her gloves and went to close the enclosure up, but paused there for a moment, looking down at the mice. The prodigal mouse was roaming her cage, fluffing the fresh pine chips into little mounds, and then suddenly she stopped to groom her whiskers, and Rosemary was overwhelmed with a sense of deja vu, remembering the night before when she'd stood here side by side with Dr. Kelley, watching the mouse do the same thing.

After this past weekend with Al, Rosemary shouldn't have had room in her brain for fond thoughts of anyone else at all. But she still stood there, frozen in place until the mouse finished grooming herself and went back to messing with the pine chips, Rosemary's subconscious providing the image and warmth of Dr. Kelley's presence beside her. As the mouse fluffed up another pile of pine chips, Rosemary shook her head, trying to clear it, and sighed. "That is really going to be a problem," she said to the cages.

"What is going to be problem?" came Dr. Kelley's voice from behind her. Rosemary viciously stomped her startle reflex into submission. She must not have heard him enter the lab because the glass enclosure had its own air supply, which had been working double-time all morning to keep up while she'd been cleaning cages, that was all. He hadn't meant to sneak up on her.

Dr. Kelley appeared at her side, looking the cages over. "Is something wrong with mice?"

Rosemary forced out a fake little laugh. "Oh, no. I was just telling these fine creatures about the day I have ahead of me. They're excellent listeners."

Dr. Kelley gave her a somewhat incredulous look, and Rosemary smiled blandly up at him. "Prepped slides are in the first fridge, along with stool samples. I've got a busy day ahead of me, but I'll be back tonight to take care of feeding them, and I'll send Charles up with any notes I have on your proposal." She paused for a moment, and considered. Weiss wouldn't emerge from his lab for another five hours or so and would probably collapse into bed shortly after, Solomon and Falk both had a couple of busy weeks ahead of them, and Gao... well, Gao didn't do well with solo introductions. "I think tomorrow I'll send you off to lunch with a couple of the other scientists on this floor. Get you introduced to your coworkers."

"And will you be joining us?"

Rosemary forced another light little laugh out. "Oh, no. I think you'll make much better progress without me hovering over you all like a mother hen." She shut the door to the glass enclosure. "Now, I'll be in my office for most of the day, and the number's right by the lab phone, along with the number for Charles' office. If you need me for something and can't find me, try him next, all right? He can always get me on my pager."

Dr. Kelley nodded stiffly, and Rosemary smiled up at him once more, then maneuvered around him and made a beeline for the door to the lab. She paused halfway out it to shoot a "And don't forget to eat lunch!" back at Dr. Kelley.

He rolled his eyes. " _Da, mama._ "

"Don't you sass me, boy," Rosemary shot back before whirling out the door of the lab and heading down the hall towards the door to the stairs. As the door to the lab swung shut behind her, she heard Dr. Kelley's bark of laughter, and for just a moment, it brought a real smile to her face.

* * *

Karl stood watching the mice through the glass front of their enclosure for he wasn't sure how long after Rosemary had left his lab. He'd realized a short while after eight that she either wasn't coming to his apartment for him, or that something had delayed her. So he had decided to make his own way to the lab complex that morning, now that he seemed to have learned which paths to take.

He had been a little startled to find Rosemary in his lab, talking to the mice. Not that he'd forgotten her promise to be on mouse duty, but when she hadn't shown up at his apartment door that morning, he had assumed that he was entirely on his own for the day. He had passed a few people on his way to the lab complex, all of them obviously out and about on tasks of their own, but the campus had been mostly still and quiet, giving the impression that everyone who worked there was already locked up in one building or another, hard at work. No one he'd passed had bothered to give him more than a cursory glance, obviously deciding for themselves that he had the authorization to be where he was, and no one had taken the time to greet him by so much as a nod of the head.

Focused. Intent. That was the impression that everyone Karl had encountered so far at Goddard gave. Until Karl had made that young man cry—what was his name, again? Andrew—both of his lab techs had been completely professional and utterly focused on what they were doing, and after Andrew had fled the lab, Aditi had continued on with her work with the mice as if Andrew had not given in to hysterics. Even Rosemary, for all that she seemed to be overly cheerful and was a tremendous flirt, gave off the impression that some small part of her mind was always searching for the next task, the next item on an internal to-do list.

So finding Rosemary in his lab, having a little chat with the mice... well. Despite the fact that he had been dwelling on her—or at least her physical appearance—far more often than he should have since he had met her, the sight of her had been a shock to his system. Finding her taking a relaxed moment to have a chat with lab animals, with no indication that she was about to rush off to some other task, had been strangely endearing, for all that it did not do to attach undue sentiment to lab animals.

Her suit today was a deep purple, the blouse under it a warm gold, a patterned kerchief tied under her chin. The bright colors turned an outfit that should have made her seem stuffy into one that leant her an air of nonchalance, of approachability, which, given her job, was probably the point. And of course, like every other suit he'd seen her wear, it was tailored close to the curve of her lower back, emphasizing the slope from her waist to her well-rounded rear in a way that left him wanting to press his hand there every time he was close to her.

Karl groaned and let his forehead fall gently against the glass front of the mouse enclosure. Perhaps in a week or two, she would become part of the background noise of the lab complex and therefore easy to ignore. Perhaps in a week or two, his priorities would shift back to what they should be, and he could get down to work without wondering what Rosemary would think of this or that.

He shouldn't be wondering such things; he'd met the woman, what, four days ago? Five? He hadn't even thought that much of her on first sight, seeing only a short, dumpy black woman who obviously relied too much on cosmetics.

But then she'd been kind to him, when no doubt she knew very little of him beyond his research and whatever personal data on him that Mr. Carter had passed her way. And then she'd taken him to her office and had ripped his research into shreds. Karl should have resented her for that, and he might have, too, if she'd just dictated at him, but instead... instead she had asked questions. The sort of questions he would have expected a research partner to ask, though Kostya had only rarely asked such questions of him. The sort of questions that made it clear she knew what she was asking about, and why she was asking this particular thing.

The sort of questions that had him imagining her voice all day yesterday, as he'd typed up his new proposal for moving forward with the research on the _Koschei Bessmertnyy_ virus. No, no, _Decima_ , he must remember to use the new name.

"Tell me why you're doing it that way," that voice that sounded like Rosemary had said inside his head as he worked. "Is there a more efficient method of achieving the same means? Have you considered this other technique? If you've discounted it, why won't it do the job as well as the method you've chosen?"

It should have been annoying, that voice in his head. But it had been comforting instead.

He lifted his forehead from the glass and frowned at the smudge it had left there. Eventually, he located cleaning supplies under one of the sinks and wiped the glass down before getting on with his work.

Karl had hoped that the slides Rosemary had prepared, two per mouse, would be contaminated or damaged or less-than-perfect in some way. But he only had to resort to the second slide twice out of twenty-four mice to get an accurate idea of what was going on with each specimen.

Was the damn woman competent at everything?

And why did he find that competence so attractive?

* * *

Rosemary settled down at her desk with the desperately needed cup of coffee Charles had handed her as soon as she'd reached the admin floor and the floppy containing Dr. Kelley's completed research proposal. As she waited for the computer to boot up, she sipped the coffee and went over the memos that had been waiting in the file holder on her door, plus the letters Charles had handed off to her before she'd sent him off to plant a thermos outside of Weiss's door.

Mr. Carter wanted a run-down on Kelley's research as soon as possible. Well, that one wasn't a surprise. And he also wanted the results of Weiss's current observation cycle as soon as they were available, which probably meant a late evening of typing up the scientist's _incredibly_ sloppy notes. Then, of course, there was the end of the month coming up soon, which meant a whole slew of other reports and what was always a particularly fraught meeting with Carter. A meeting she expected to be even more fraught than usual this month if he continued to insist that she was already over-budget for the year, when she knew for a _fact_ that the allocations for lab equipment came out of a _completely_ different budget than the salaries for lab techs.

She tapped a brown manila envelope labeled only "Kelley's first bonus: award at own discretion" with a fingernail a few times, frowning, then opened it. Ah. A government report, no doubt intercepted by one of their operatives in Russia. "In the matter of the death of Comrade Vologin and the destruction of his research, Comrade Kinski has been found guilty and has been removed from his position within the party."

Rosemary smiled a grim little smile, and shoved the report back into the envelope. No doubt this Kinski would find himself in one of the more unpleasant Russian prisons for the foreseeable future. The gulag system had officially ended several decades ago, but Rosemary knew that some of the prisons in Russia weren't so much different than those labor camps had been.

She considered the envelope for another moment, then shook her head and set it aside for now. Best to save it for when Dr. Kelley had really earned it.

Or for the next time she needed to remind Dr. Kelley exactly how much Mr. Carter had given him, when Carter had brought Kelley into Goddard's fold.

 _And how much Carter took,_ a little voice in her head provided.

Rosemary shook her head to clear it and settled down to work her way through Kelley's research proposal, a pad of paper at the ready for any remaining notes she might have.

To her surprise, Rosemary emerged at the other end of the proposal with only a few notes on the pad, minor changes in wording that had no real effect on the actual contents. Instead of sending them up to Kelley she simply went back through and implemented them herself. It was the work of minutes to select the portions relevant to Carter, a mere half-hour to add necessary context, and then... and then she was done, in a quarter of the time she'd allotted for the task. Frowning, she read over the proposal again, but no, Dr. Kelley had apparently taken all of her suggestions to heart, and, in the few areas she hadn't offered any changes, he seemed to have asked himself "What information would Rosemary want clarification on?" to great effect.

"Well," she muttered at her computer screen. "First time that's happened."

She printed a copy of her report on Kelley's research off for Carter and stuffed it in a manila envelope, marked for immediate delivery, then picked up her coffee and took a sip, wincing. It had gone stone cold over the past hour, but she drank the rest of the cup down anyway.

After all, she still had those end-of-the-month reports to get started on.

* * *

Karl finished inspecting the mouse droppings as well, then disposed of everything that counted as a biohazard in the container marked for it. He wanted to get on with manufacturing a new batch of _Decima_ before his remaining samples degraded entirely, but he had no idea where to get the supplies for it.

"Epps," Rosemary's voice was curt as she answered her office phone.

"Ah, Rosemary. I was wondering... I wish to manufacture more of retrovirus. Where can I get petri dishes and cell cultures?"

"Check the second fridge," came Rosemary's response, her tone a little less frigid. "There should be established cell cultures there. Mouse, rat, rabbit, cow, human, and I think there might be some chimpanzee in there too."

Karl blinked in surprise. "Thank you. That sounds, uh..."

"Splendid?"

"Excessive."

"Well, anything worth doing is worth doing well, and anything worth doing well is worth going completely over the top on," Rosemary said in a tone of voice that left Karl certain she was mocking something Mr. Carter had said.

"I am not certain that is true," muttered Karl, who had discovered that the phone cord stretched far enough to get over to the second refrigerator and was now looking down on a truly vast supply of cell cultures. "But thank you. How long will these be viable for—oh."

"Saw the dates?"

" _Da_."

"Need anything else?"

"Some assistance would be appreciated, if Aditi is free later today."

"I don't know that she will be, but... well, I could use a break from end-of-month reports. Want me to come up and lend a hand?"

Karl found himself thinking of the way he'd come across Rosemary that morning, standing in front of the mouse enclosure, the perfect curve of her lower back taunting him from across the lab. He flushed, intending to decline her assistance... but no, this would go much faster if he had a second set of hands, and if the slides Rosemary had prepared that morning were any indication, she'd probably be excellent at the job. And, he thought hopefully, the more he saw her, the more likely it would be that he would become accustomed to the effect she had on him.

"That... that would be good," he managed to stammer out after an uncomfortably long pause.

"I assure you, I was a lab tech for nearly a decade. I _do_ know what I'm doing."

"I believe you!"

"It's just you didn't sound sure." Rosemary's voice had turned warm and teasing. "Were my slides really that much of a mess? You didn't have to re-do any of them, did you?"

Karl snorted at that. "As if you did not know that they were perfect," he shot back.

There was a silence from Rosemary's end this time, and then she said, in a slow, careful voice, "I'll be up there in five minutes, assuming my check-in with Charles doesn't unearth any problems. Get everything prepped?"

Karl barely had time to say "Of course," before the phone line went dead. He went back to the refrigerator and started pulling out what they'd need to get started. It wouldn't hurt to try and manufacture a larger amount of the retrovirus than necessary; it was always a bit touch-and-go, getting _Decima_ to thrive outside a living being.

He was all set up when Rosemary bustled in to the lab, a plastic smock covering her coat and a pair of lab goggles hanging from her neck. She made a beeline for the box of gloves and pulled a pair on, then shot him a big grin that almost made it to her eyes. "Shall we?"

They worked quietly, each at a separate table. Karl tried to be surprised that it seemed like Rosemary was finishing up three cell cultures in the time it took him to do two, but couldn't quite bring himself to be. After all, he had normally left this part of the work to Kostya and their lab techs back in Russia. It was something he'd only ever done at times when everyone was out of the lab, when he'd been there far later than he ought to have been due to a late-night brainstorm.

Rosemary silently took half the cultures remaining in front of him when she finished before he did, and then they put the whole lot into the incubation chamber. She stripped her gloves off and tossed them aside, then stretched her arms over her head, her back popping loudly as she did.

"Lunch time, I think," she said. "Well, lunch time for you. Time for me to head back to my office and get back to those reports."

"You have already eaten?"

"No, but if Charles values his skin, he remembered to save me a sandwich today from the stuff the cafeteria sent over."

"And if he did not, would you go to lunch with me?" Karl snapped his mouth shut as the final word slipped out, suddenly, painfully aware that he'd been using a coaxing, flirtatious tone of voice that was completely inappropriate for someone he worked with, no matter how attractive he found her.

Rosemary shot him a sharp look, but didn't comment. "If Charles forgot, then I guess I'm eating flayed assistant for lunch." She shut her eyes and twisted her head back and forth, popping her neck as well. "Or ramen. I've got a packet or two in my desk."

"A choice only marginally superior to cannibalism," Karl found himself muttering.

Rosemary let out a snort of laughter at that, then turned away from him and headed towards the door to his lab, waving a hand over her shoulder at him. "Go eat a proper lunch, you!"

She was gone before Karl had a chance to shoot another retort her way, and some small part of him wanted to follow her, to see if he could get her to laugh, to smile another of those smiles that went all the way to her eyes.

Instead, he waited until he was sure she would have had time to get down the stairs to her office before leaving the lab himself.


	11. Chapter 11

Rosemary was finishing off the last of the sandwich Charles had saved for her for lunch when there was a brisk knock on the door to her office, followed by Dr. Weiss opening the door. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked about ready to fall over.

“Rosemary. I'm for bed.”

Rosemary frowned and removed her reading glasses, letting them drop to her chest. “Your notes?”

“Damn. No. Still in the lab. I'll go back and get them.”

Rosemary hauled herself to her feet and bustled around her desk, grabbing Dr. Weiss by the elbow before he could leave the room. “Oh, no you don't. You've been awake for 36 hours. You go to bed. I can fetch them.”

“Ah, _meine Liebe_ , if I were not humid in temperament I would court you most assiduously.” Weiss smiled his kind, wrinkled smile down at her.

Rosemary rolled her eyes. “If only being gay as the day is long stopped you from flirting with poor impressionable young misses like myself.” She guided Weiss out to the hallway and turned to lock her office door. “Anyway, I'm not doing it out of the kindness of my heart. I'm putting you in charge of babysitting Gao tomorrow at lunch.”

Weiss blinked sleepily. “Is there some event I have forgotten to put on my calendar?” he rumbled.

“No, I'm adding something to your schedule. Lunch with the new guy.” Rosemary pushed through the door to the stairwell and paused on the landing with Weiss at her side.

“Ah, the elusive Russian has arrived at last?”

“Who else?”

Weiss frowned. “Well, _Engelein_ , I shall do my best with Edwina, but you know she does not like strangers at the best of times. And Russian strangers…”

“Even less, I know. Your best is all I'm asking.” Rosemary sighed. “I figure you've got the best chance of anyone where Gao is concerned.”

“What about Sarah?”

“She’s working with Dominguez for the next few weeks.”

“Ah, yes. Well.” Dr. Weiss shut his eyes, looking very old and tired for a moment.

“Go to bed,” Rosemary said, patting him carefully on the shoulder. “I’ll do a final check on your lab and get your notes.”

“Don’t touch the—”

“I know, Weiss! Bed. Now.”

“Yes, yes.”

Dr. Weiss made his way down the stairs, waving a tired good-bye over his shoulder to Rosemary, and she made her way to his lab on the fifth floor. Of course, she’d only just gathered up the notes when she got a page from Charles with the code for Dominguez, so she stopped off on the fourth floor on the way back to her office. Both Dominguez and Falk looked up when Rosemary entered the lab.

“What’s up?”

Dr. Falk sighed. “I need my old notes from the Janus for this.”

Rosemary winced. “You know those got put away under a higher clearance level than you technically have access to.”

“I know, though why I can’t get access to my own damn results! It’s not like I don’t know what happened.” Falk sighed again, then rubbed a hand over her close-cropped silver hair. “See what you can get out of Adriane? I’d ask Janet, but she doesn’t have your way with the woman.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Rosemary said. “Anything else while I’m here?”

Falk shook her head. “Nah. Just whatever you can get of my notes as soon as you can get them.”

Rosemary suppressed a sigh of annoyance. If she had to spend her afternoon wrangling Adriane, she would definitely be in the office late into the night in order to put together a report on Weiss’s findings. And that was assuming his results didn’t have any definitive proof of a Theta Scenario—no. He would have said something before leaving the lab complex, no matter how exhausted he was. So just a tedious evening of deciphering his handwriting, then. “Page me if you need me, then,” she said, whirling back out of the lab.

* * *

Adriane was more than a little irritated with Rosemary’s request. “Half of those notes are in the Black and not coming back you, you realize.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And the rest…”

Rosemary sighed. “Just redact for yellow clearance, all right? That’s what Dominguez is at. Aditi as well. I’ll wrangle Falk if she protests.”

Adriane nodded, and considered for a moment. “It will take an hour.”

“I’ll go get my latest shipment of papers off of Florence and start this week’s reading, then,” Rosemary called after Adriane.

When Adriane returned to her office, Rosemary had balanced herself improbably on one of the guest chairs, her heels off, her feet tucked up under her, the reading glasses she kept on a chain around her neck balanced on her nose as she read her way through one of the papers that must have been part of Florence’s weekly delivery of scientific articles.

“This will take some time,” Adriane said deliberately.

Rosemary glanced at Adriane over the top of her glasses. “I’ve been up and about since three this morning with not nearly enough coffee. Like hell am I trekking all the way back to the lab complex to turn around and come straight back here.”

“Perhaps you would like a reading room of your own?”

“I’ll fall asleep.”

“And you will not in here?”

“Oh, no, these chairs are _far_ too uncomfortable,” Rosemary said with a little laugh.

Adriane frowned, but as long as Rosemary wasn’t too much of a pest, Adriane would be able to get on with her redactions just as well with the other woman in the room as she would alone.

Not that Rosemary could ever be relied upon to not be a pest.

* * *

Four papers and an hour later, Rosemary sighed and stretched. The spare chairs in Adriane’s office really were astoundingly uncomfortable, but it turned out she was so tired she’d been on the verge of dozing off anyway.

She knew that Adriane would prefer her to go pester Florence, if Rosemary needed to pester someone in order to stay awake, but Rosemary didn’t know Florence well enough to ask the question that had been stuck in the back of her mind since earlier that afternoon.

“Do I give off ‘Please flirt with me, gay men’ vibes?”

One of Adriane’s eyebrows ticked upwards an infinitesimal amount, a sure sign that she was either interested or annoyed, but she didn't answer or look up from the document she was redacting.

“I mean, Weiss was bad enough, but Marya…”

Adriane kept her eyes locked on the paper in front of her, her hands moving so quickly they seemed to blur, at least from Rosemary’s perspective.

After a long silence, Adriane seemed to realize that Rosemary was waiting for an answer of some sort. “I thought you enjoyed Weiss flirting with you.”

Rosemary bit her lower lip, then decided she might as well go all-in. After all, it wasn't like she had anyone to talk to about this, at least not until the next time Al had a free evening, and god only knew when that would be. “I don't find Weiss attractive.”

“You find yourself attracted to Vologin?”

“Yes,” came Rosemary’s blunt response. “Very much.”

This got Rosemary the briefest flicker of a judgmental look from Adriane.

“I know,” Rosemary said with a sigh. “But it's not like I can exactly _control_ who I'm attracted to.”

“You could stop yourself from flirting back,” Adriane said, her tone exceptionally dry, even for Adriane.

“Oh, _Liebchen_ , you know I'll never manage that. It's instinct.” The words were out of Rosemary’s mouth before she had a chance to consider them.

Adriane let out an irritable little huff. “Given the way you cannot seem to resist flirting with me…”

“Yes, well, you I keep hoping I’ll manage to seduce some day,” Rosemary shot back. “How about it, Adriane? Want to make a go of it?”

This actually got Adriane’s attention, her full attention, for a long moment, and then Adriane shook her head and turned back to her redactions. “Even if you were truly interested—and I think you are not—you know why that would not work, Rosmarin.”

Rosemary frowned. “Just because Pryce—”

“I do not want to talk about it.”

“Even given what…”

Adriane glared, but Rosemary soldiered on.

“You’re not unlovable, Adriane,” she said softly.

“You are assuming I wish to be loved.” Adriane threw down her marker and straightened the pile of paper in front of her before shoving it into a file folder and shoving it across the desk in Rosemary’s direction. “Here. Dr. Falk’s notes.”

Rosemary shoved her shoes back on, gathered up her pile of articles, then took the file folder from the edge of Adriane’s desk. “Thanks, _Liebchen_.”

There was the briefest nod of acknowledgement from Adriane before she turned to her computer, and Rosemary sighed and turned to leave. Well. That had gone well.

“Rosmarin?”

Rosemary paused in the doorway and glanced over her shoulder. “Yes?”

“The flirting is part of your charm. Do not give it up.”

Rosemary beamed across the office at Adriane. “You think I’m charming?”

Adriane rolled her eyes. “Not at all, you dreadful woman. Now get out of my office.”

Rosemary saluted saucily in Adriane’s direction and sailed out of the archives, still grinning.

They were still friends.


End file.
